Tier One Smartphone Vendors Feeling Heat From Upstarts Xiaomi, Others, Futuresource Says

High-profile smartphone brands including HTC, Microsoft and Sony are struggling to keep pace amid the emergence of strong Chinese and Indian manufacturers, said Futuresource. Xiaomi had 33 percent growth in the first half of 2015, following 231 percent growth in first half last year, Futuresource said. Xiaomi’s strategy is driven by flash sales, low price points for design-oriented handsets and key strategic distribution partnership deals, said Futuresource. Other companies, such as Coolpad and Oppo in China, Micromax and Karbonn in India, Advan in Indonesia and Cherry Mobile in the Philippines are taking similar approaches and adding local celebrity endorsements to heighten consumer appeal, said the researcher. HTC, Microsoft and Sony, meanwhile, are “struggling to keep pace” while going through reorganizations, cost-cutting and strategic reviews of how they can compete effectively in growth markets such as Southeast Asia, it said. While market leader Samsung has maintained its position through scale, product range and marketing budget, its share dropped by 4.3 percent in the first half, said Futuresource. “There has been a significant amount of growth in the mobile handset market over recent years,” said analyst John Devlin, but “mature markets are nearing saturation. Migration from feature phones continues to gather momentum globally with countries like Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines all seeing smartphones outsell feature phones for the first time in 2014,” he said. The smartphone market had slower growth in 2014 than in previous years for smartphones, expanding by 23 percent to 1.3 billion units, compared with growth of 48 percent in 2013, it said.