The Smartphone wave will continue to dominate the next few years, predominantly in emerging markets, says Pyramid Research, in its latest report on ‘Global Smartphone Forecast’. While it focuses on operator and vendor strategies, along with cutthroat competition among various mobile OS platforms, there are little surprises in the report. The report also investigate the detail state of Smartphone market in eight crucial market, namely China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, US, UK & Nigeria etc.
Some of the highlights of the reports are:
• China will become the biggest Smartphone market overtaking US in 2010, while other markets like Brazil, India, and Nigeria will record compound annual growth rates above 30{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3}, through 2014.
• There lies huge opportunity in Smartphone segment, with unit sale may cross figure of 1.8Bn by end of 2014.
• As operators’ strategies vary across countries, so too do the market shares of operating systems. Because of local conditions, the BlackBerry has a strong market position in India, while Linux-based systems do much better in China.
• Operator’s strategies differ a lot based on method of payment; postpaid and prepaid. In dominantly postpaid markets, where there’s no dearth of subsidies which produces high competition among operators, vendors like AT & T are offering subsidies on handsets along with attractive data plans to woo customers.
• While in predominantly prepaid markets, such as Russia, operators like MTS are focusing more on value added services (VAS), by offering cost proposition over the content offered. It would be really interesting to see how Indian market players will come up with innovative VAS, to improve Smartphone penetration , which is dominated by prepaid category of subscribers.
You will find some other interesting questions answered in report like, how Smartphone market adaptation will unfold in next five years? What are the vendor strategies which will pay the returns? How Smartphone market will look like in 2014? Etc. As Nokia continued to show disappointing results in Smartphone segment, while Apple became the most profitable handset maker recently, the Smartphone segment shows interesting trends. Though handset market shows sign of recovery, there’s a lot to be unfolded in coming years. Market is still open for top spot!
