A brief history of the changing smartphone landscape in China

Many of my Chinese friends just woke up to realize Samsung is no longer the smartphone leader in China. Over the past 5 years, the smartphone landscape in China has changed drastically. Out of the 4 major Chinese vendors - 中华酷联 (ZTE, Huawei, Coolpad and Lenovo) that controlled close to 40% of the market back in 2013, only Huawei survived through vigorous competition and maintains the leading position in China. The decline of Samsung seems irreversible since 2014 since Chinese vendors offer more affordable devices with locally targeted branding message. It was also the year that Xiaomi launched the Redmi Note series, aiming to cater to the big screen preference of Chinese consumers. 2015 witnessed the success of online business model of the 5-year-old company as Xiaomi became the first vendor to claim 15% of the market share in China. 2016 was the year of victory for the 蓝绿兄弟 (Green and Blue Brothers). Oppo and Vivo launched aggressive marketing campaigns targeting on the youth, providing mid-range smartphones with better cameras. Their strength lies in offline channel marketing and sales, inherited from the BBK electronics was known for selling Voice Repeater in China. The explosive expansion enabled them to take up close 30% of the market share within 2 years.

Despite the ebb and flow over the years, the smartphone market has been consolidating. The top 5 smartphone vendors further widened their gap with the smaller vendors, controlling more than 70% of market share in 2017. This consolidation is expected to accelerate in 2018 as a few mid-size vendors fall out of the game and the overall market growth stalls.

https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/china%E2%80%99s-smartphone-market-suffers-first-ever-annual-decline-shipments-fall-4-2017

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