Android Report: Chinese Smartphone Invasion is Coming Soon

The smartphone industry as a whole keeps on growing. More and more companies all over the world manufacturing smartphones, and most of them come from China. That Asian country has tons of registered companies which happen to manufacture smartphones, some of which have been around for a long time, like Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo, others, not so much.

Xiaomi is a prime example of a relatively young company (founded back in 2010) which has managed to succeed in a short period of time. This company is actually the number one smartphone OEM in China, trumping even Huawei, which is a close second at the moment.
That being said, Xiaomi is the best example of an immensely successful young Chinese company, but there are tons of other Asian smartphone manufacturers that are surging forward: Meizu, OnePlus, Letv, Elephone, ZUK, Oppo, ZTE, Huawei and these are just some examples. The vast majority of China-based smartphone manufacturers offer really competitive prices for their devices, and a significant number of those OEMs (all of the ones listed above) offer great products as well. These companies are extremely competitive, and are the main reason why sales are down for some of the bigger OEMs, like Samsung for example. The Korea-based tech giant has plummeted in China last year, while Xiaomi and Huawei managed to grab a huge portion of the market share. This essentially means that Samsung lost consumers to the likes of Chinese OEMs.

Samsung is only an example here, and is not the only ‘victim’ in all this. HTC and Sony are trying to keep their heads above the water, and are feeling strong pressure to do or die as far as the smartphone business goes. Chinese OEMs tend to provide better-specced devices which are far more affordable than offerings from HTC and Sony (is most cases), and the overall quality of their products has improved immensely over the last couple of years (though that depends from one OEM to another).

Not all of the listed smartphone OEMs above are selling their devices globally, but most of them do, and the rest of them are pushing to expand to more areas in the coming months. Letv, for example, is planning to enter the US smartphone market before the end of this year. Xiaomi, on the other hand, has expanded to Brazil earlier this year, and plans to enter additional markets soon. Huawei is making a huge international push, and we can expect Meizu to push to markets outside of Asia in the near future as well.

Top smartphone manufacturers in the world will surely feel even more pressure from Chinese OEMs in 2016, which is great for consumers. The smartphone business will become even more competitive, and along with that, less profitable. Next year might be crucial for Sony Mobile, HTC and BlackBerry, the company’s officials have already hinted that they’ll evaluate their options if they don’t manage to profit from the smartphone business in 2016. We’ve seen big changes in the smartphone market, and even more things will change in the coming year. It will certainly going to be interesting to see how will top OEMs deal with the extremely competitive prices most of these Chinese OEMs are bringing along with them, or better yet, how they intend to counter that.