The Chinese market research firm Sino has published a report saying that in September of this year, the market share of global brands like Apple and Samsung has fallen to 13.3% from 21% a year ago. This means that global brands like Apple and Samsung have lost 36.7% of their market share to Chinese smartphone companies in the last year.
One the other hand, Chinese smartphone companies have boosted their market share from 79% to 86.7%. This is likely due to the fact that these companies work more on the offline market. The market share of the offline market has also grown by 23.6% last year. With the unique advantage of their offline channel strength, “GHOV” (Gionee, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo) dominate the domestic market, occupying the top 4 places. Gionee, notably, has been consistently in the top 4 for 9 months.
DIGITIMES Research has predicted that in the 2017 global smartphone market, only Gionee, Oppo, and BBK(Vivo) will have a shipment growth rate higher than 15%. Continual development of the physical channel has allowed Gionee to create a big web of channels. Throughout the whole country, from the first-tier cities to smaller tiers of towns and cities, Gionee now has more than 100,000 corporate sales points and more than 300,000 sales counters. It also exports to more than 40 countries and regions and has agreements with eight national telecom carriers.
Making products that users like more and having an excellent penetration of offline channels are both important factors for GHOV’s success. Various data show that, with the steady development of GHOV, the mobile phone market has gravitated to a situation with GHOV leading the pack. In the future, these companies will continue its strong development and hold on to the lead.
In the coming years, the demand growth momentum of the smartphone will mainly come from emerging markets such as South Asia, Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, and other regions, with a large number of functional mobile phone users turning to the smartphone. The offline market is more important in these regions. The effort that Chinese smartphone companies put into offline markets will be rewarded by a larger market share. In the near future, this sales strategy will be adopted by more and more smartphone companies.
