Some popular domestic-brand phones.
Over the past couple of years, Chinese companies have been cranking out smartphones like clockwork while global brands like Nokia and LG have busied themselves with losing market share left and right. The result, according to research firm Canalys, is that as of Q3 2012, domestic brands account for 60 percent of China’s smartphone market.
The top five smartphone brands are Samsung, Lenovo, CoolPad, Huawei, and ZTE according to the research firm. Samsung is a Korean company, of course, but the other companies are all domestic brands.
Whether this trend will continue is anyone’s guess. Lenovo’s recent performance would seem to be an indication of growing Chinese dominance, as its mobile division has been kicking ass recently. ZTE, on the other hand, is bleeding staffers and money, and cutbacks to the mobile department (or straight-up bankruptcy) could lie in the company’s future.
[via Sina Tech]
A really great addition to this article would have been to go a bit deeper into who the actual Chinese companies are. The 4 listed may be the larger, but the current “frothiness” of the rest could be a much more interesting story.
The number of manufacturers fighting at the low end is almost too high to keep track. You can readily identify them, though, as they all use MediaTek chipsets. Still, they are smartphones and even though MediaTek isn’t competing at the level of Samsung, Qualcomm, et al. their solutions are cheap and surprisingly powerful. Need to wait some time to see which of those brands can rise out of the muck.
At the higher end of specifications and/or price, it’s pretty easy. There’s the usual suspects Lenovo, ZTE (now including their new boutique brand Nubia), Huawei, and CoolPad. There’s BBK, a traditional brand reinventing itself with its own boutique marque Vivo. There’s Newman, another tech warhorse trying to reinvent itself through smartphones (jury’s still way out). There’s the unconventional Meizu and Oppo (the older ones) as well as Xiaomi (the new kid).
And that’s really about it, unless you want to look at a few established-but-diminished brands like Amoi and Malata.
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20121108000080&cid=1206