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Android is leading the Chinese smartphone explosion

by Scott Bicheno on 3 December 2010, 16:07

Tags: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

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Off to a flyer

In case you haven't heard, China's quite a big market, so it's fair to assume it be a key component of the great mobile Internet land grab. A recent report from Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt reveals that, in the past year, Google has moved into pole position in the world's biggest market.

Allthingsd reports the revelation that the Chinese smartphone market tripled in the past year, with between eight and ten million smartphones sold. Even more remarkable is the fact that Android now represents half of that market, having no presence at all a year ago.

Meanwhile Fortune, from which we got the chart below, points out that the report has found Apple's performance in the Chinese smartphone market to be "somewhat disappointing" so far, but that it expects iPhone sales to improve as recent launches gather momentum.

As you can see from the table, Nokia does pretty well in China, which is one of the reasons it's still the global smartphone leader by volume, despite the more positive publicity around Android and the iPhone. But Nokia had 70 percent of this market a year ago, so it's losing market share rapidly.

 

 

HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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Posted by miniyazz - Sat 04 Dec 2010 11:20
How did Nokia get so big? They've been losing market share for what seems like years now and still no-one else is anywhere near catching their market penetration :p
Posted by aidanjt - Sat 04 Dec 2010 11:43
The only serious market share they're losing is the smartphone market. ‘dumbphones’ are still a vast and expanding market, it just doesn't get anywhere as near much hype, partially because it's a lower margin market, and partially because people are stupid.

If Nokia stopped keeping Symbian on life support and let it die naturally, and got MeeGo finished, they could easily start regaining market share. It also would help if they didn't stick to NIH mentality wrt OS choice.
Posted by crossy - Mon 06 Dec 2010 11:44
aidanjt
The only serious market share they're losing is the smartphone market. ‘dumbphones’ are still a vast and expanding market, it just doesn't get anywhere as near much hype, partially because it's a lower margin market, and partially because people are stupid.
Could also be because Nokia “smartphones” are - generally speaking - not that good. Yes, they've had popular models like the N95 but even then there's been a lot of drawbacks. To me at least, later models - like the N97 - have been even less appealing and more compromised.
On the other hand Nokia do seem to have a talent in pushing out dumb phones that just do what you need them for and keep on going. I got a very basic Nokia 2330 (for work) this year and it's very reliable with excellent battery life.
aidanjt
If Nokia stopped keeping Symbian on life support and let it die naturally, and got MeeGo finished, they could easily start regaining market share. It also would help if they didn't stick to NIH mentality wrt OS choice.
Couldn't agree more - Symbian is an idea who's time is past - leave it to the midrange phones and put something else (heck anything else!) on the top end stuff. Last S60 device I had a go at was pretty unusable actually. I'd love to see Nokia do an Android phone - with commitment I think they could turn out something pretty special - but even I realise that this isn't likely.
On the other hand I'm very impressed with Meego. Got v1.1 on my old Acer netbook and it makes Ubuntu Meerkat-UNR look pretty sluggish on the same hardware. Not sure how much of that pizazz would transfer to a phone though - lower powered cpu, smaller screen, etc. Could be interesting to see …

One thing that does worry me about what the article's saying - if Android is so popular in the PRC, does that mean we're going to see an upswing in the amount of malware for 'droid? :surprised:
(No xenophobia intended, it's just I remember reading a report that the majority of attacks are now coming out of China)
Posted by aidanjt - Mon 06 Dec 2010 11:57
crossy
Could also be because Nokia “smartphones” are - generally speaking - not that good.
I don't even think it's the hardware itself which is particularly bad, for e.g. the N900 is pretty slick, Maemo works great for now, and it's pretty much the model phone for MeeGo development, so it'll get that OS first. It's just Symbian, it's horrible, users hate it, developers hate it, everyone hates it. Nokia is shooting itself in the foot by keeping it alive long past sell-by date.