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Japan Phone Makers Perform Poorly in China
[November 15, 2012]

Japan Phone Makers Perform Poorly in China


SHANGHAI, Nov 15, 2012 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) -- Japanese mobile phone makers perform poorly in the Chinese market and industry observers believe that the situation will become worse in the near future.

According to the latest data by Analysys International, China saw the sales volume of smartphones in the third quarter of this year reach 49.17 million units, up 121 percent from a year ago and contributing to 77.1 percent of the domestic mobile phone market. Obviously, smartphones have become a mainstream product in the market and there, US-based Apple and South Korea-based Samsung Electronics saw profit be pretty owning to high brand awareness and homegrown Chinese mobile phone makers witnessed market share continue rising owning to relatively low production cost. While, Japanese mobile phone makers performed poorly and industry observers believed that the situation would become worse in the near future.



NEC reforayed into the market with a high-end smartphone product in April this year, but the terminal was found to be sold on 360buy.com, a top Chinese 3C online retailer, with a tag of only CNY 1,999 per unit, compared to an initial price of about CNY 5,000 per unit, recently. Kyocera also restepped into the market at the start of this year, but a smartphone product customized for China Telecom failed to appear on the official website of the latter. Later, the terminal was found to be sold by a vendor on Taobao.com, the C2C unit of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group, and the tag was only CNY 699 per unit, compared to an initial price of CNY 3,999 per unit. Sharp experienced a similar situation and in line with a top executive of a south China-based mobile phone distributor, it seemed to have had a plan to quit the market since it reached an agreement with Taiwan-based OEM giant Hon Hai Group over ODM last month. Sony still performs actively, but data from iSuppli shows that it seizes only 3.5 percent share in the market currently, ranking No.8.

Yang Qun, a famed industry observer, said in an interview that the domestic smartphone market grew fast in the past two years and it took it only about one year to transfer to quad-core products from dual-core ones. Some homegrown Chinese mobile phone makers suffered a huge loss because that they failed to make a quick response to the market changes. Also because of this, Japanese mobile phone makers saw performance there become poorly. And amid fiercer competition, there would be possibility for them, especially Sharp, to quit the market one day.


(USD 1 = CNY 6.22) Source: www.nf.nfdaily.cn (November 15, 2012)

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