Samsung delivered nearly 100 million smart-phones, in the 2nd quarter of this year alone. Where does Apple go from here?

For the second quarter of this year the Korean company Samsung delivered about 76 million smartphones – in comparison with 48,7 million in the second quarter of last year. This year Samsung market share increased from 31,1% to 33,1%.

Apple also increased its deliveries in the second quarter, but its share in the smartphone market decreased from 16.6% to 13.6% respectively. 

Competitive Market

Manufacturers LG and ZTE also showed an increase in their market share in the reporting period when made  5.3% and 5%, respectively, Huawei completes the top five with 4.8% share of the smartphone market.

Some experts think that the current iPhone portfolio is not impressive and Apple runs the risk to be “clamped” between inexpensive 3-inch models of Android-smartphones and 5-inch Android-smartphones of higher price segment.

According to the research, world smartphones’ deliveries in the second quarter of 2013 grew by 47% to 230 million units in comparison with the same period last year. Thus the company’s experts connect high growth in the smartphones’ deliveries this year to increased demand for models supporting 4G-ties in developed regions such as the U.S., and models with 3G in developing countries such as India.

In the world market it is necessary to mark a trend on lowering of the average smartphone’s price, and also the proceeding growth in the share of the category “other” “This situation is the evidence of increased competition in the smartphone market, where even the leadership of such hyper successful companies as Samsung and Apple, permanently is exposed to check on durability. Also some experts suppose that sudden changes in a situation in the market won’t be and the demand for “entry level” smartphones will grow as the number of competitors. It is possible to increase the market share of Indian smartphones vendors, as in recent months Indian companies are successful in the market.

The popularity of cheaper smartphones continues to grow, the vendors task is not to raise the prices, while continuing to offer high-quality devices.

Nowadays the analysts think that sales of available smartphones will grow with the highest rates. They said that one of the reasons is a growing popularity of small, lightweight tablet computers, that’s why users have decreased the requirements to the functional smartphone.

But we should pay attention that the situation is not so clear and has some difference in different countries. For example, the Russian smartphone market has its own specific. Also there are certain biases concerning the situation in the whole world, related to the market history. For example in Russia the interest to models of the Finnish brand Nokia is higher. In addition, in Russia the LTE networks still aren’t developed that also affects the market where there aren’t enough smartphones’ models with support for LTE and the average price segment of such devices is hardly provided.

So today we can only assume that over time, the situation will level off, but nowadays we can see that the specificity remains and the difference in the top five vendors in the world and in Russia clearly demonstrates it. Recall, according to the recent research of the smartphone market in the second quarter of 2013 in Russia, conducted by MTS Corporation, Samsung is the leading smartphone vendor in the country (31.4%), while Nokia has the second place (14,3%) and the third position in the Russian market Apple and Sony divide (by 8.7%).

About the author: Alex Strike is an eBooks download website manager and consultant.