By Bilal Hamdan


Technology moves at a pace that even the worlds experts struggle to keep up with. As soon as one company announces a new development, then another will announce something else. All of this research and development costs the companies a lot of money, and this means that the latest devices from the likes of Samsung and Apple are expensive. So it is no surprise to see Apple, Samsung lose ground to Chinese handset makers in Q1, which are available on the market at much cheaper prices.



The top manufacturers of smartphones in the world were Samsung and Apple in 2013. In 2014 also they led the list by sharing the first and second positions respectively, but the notable feature is the decrease in their respective market shares. Samsung was first with an overall market share of 31.2% which saw a slight drop of 1.2% compared to the market share of Q1 of 2013. Apple came second with a market share of 15.5% in Q1 2014. But Apple also lost 2.2% of their market share of the first quarter in 2013. The clear gainers with an increase in the market share were the Chinese handset giants Lenovo & Huawei, who captured the third and fourth positions respectively.

This is because Apple has nowhere else to go to purchase the screens that they require, for the quality that they want. They do use other suppliers, but they only produce a small amount compared to Samsung. The same thing applies to the main chips, such as ARM, and many other internal components.

Samsung retained the first place with a market share of 31.2% in Q1 of 2014. It has a share of 32.4% during the same period of 2013. Apple came second with a share of 15.3% whereas it has a share of 17.5% in 2013. Huawei was placed third with a market share of 4.7%, a slight increase when compared to the same period of 2013. Lenovo was fifth with a share of 4.6% in Q1 of 2014, whereas it only had a share of 3.9% in Q1 of 2013.

The big sellers of mobile phones in China are all Android models, and they all now use version 4. This means that they are running the same software as most branded names, such as HTC and Samsung.

It was not a real surprise to the technology industry when recent sales figures emerged and they showed that Apple, Samsung loses ground to Chinese handset makers in Q1. Demand for branded products had been on the rise in China, but the cost of these units is still out of reach for the average person. So at some point China was going to start producing units that would be able to compete with the more well-known products.




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