The smartphone market is in a state of confusion. Is the end of smart phones really?
Sales figures in the first quarter of 2019, which many smart phone manufacturers have recently announced, seem to be having a lot of difficulty selling their phones, especially high-priced phones.
Samsung pulls back and Apple pulls away
iPhone sales are slightly lower than they were in the fourth quarter of 2018, which is normal as they launch their new phones simultaneously this year, but with 30% annual sales declining they are seriously considering a new strategy that is not limited to launching phones Cheaper than the iPhone XR but also offering something new to the users, the iPhone XS phone is nothing more than a larger version of his predecessor iPhone X.
Google Pixel phones also declined, as the company's chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, said the number of devices sold was falling year after year, adding more pressure on the leading smartphone industry.
Although Samsung was the first in sales of nearly 72 million smartphones, it began to lose part of the market due to a 8% drop in sales.
Samsung, which launched its new flagship handset, the Galaxy S10, which was widely acclaimed and smashed by many previous sales figures, said: "Despite the large sales figures for the S10 phone, Low and middle class "category.
Huawei swallows competitors' share in smart phone war
Huawei, China's biggest seller, topped the list with sales up 50% from the first quarter of last year as Huawei took advantage of its successful strategy as companies struggled to sell their new products. Some analysts attribute the reason to the company's large and diverse range of phones targeting all markets and categories.
Huawei controls only 5% of the smart phone market by the beginning of 2015, becoming the second largest market leader in terms of market share, dominating 17% of the global market and promising to surpass Samsung and occupy first place in two years on Most.
Experts differ in explaining why Huawei's sales are so crazy and shrinking at big players such as Samsung and Apple. Some blame this for the global market, while others are of the opinion that the low and medium phone market is beginning to affect the rest of the price groups. Has fallen from its previous level.
Do these end smart phones
All of these reasons lead us to say that the end of the game is imminent. I do not mean that the smart phones will go extinct and all the manufacturers of these phones will go bankrupt, and the companies will be faced with two options.
Either to find a new way to distinguish their phones from the rest of the competitors and convince users that they still have to upgrade their phones as the addition of the fifth generation of communications 5g, or smart phones will continue to evolve to eliminate the fundamental differences between them, so users start to buy new phones according to their value rather than the producer.
The biggest concerns of manufacturers are realized here. Their reputation, which they have spent years in building, will not have any role in the marketing of their products and the price will be the main player. Looking at the graphical curve of smart phones in the past years, we will see that companies have been doing their best and resorting to new tricks to convince users to buy new phones as the processor slows down the lower the performance of the battery more.
Google, for example, has offered Pixel 3 phones at half the price value a while ago, reducing the price of its phones by $ 200.
Samsung also deducted $ 200 from the price of its new S10 phone, although it was only 6 or 7 weeks old but the company was having trouble selling it. Even Apple, which sticks to every penny of its phones, has been forced to lower the price of iPhone phones in the Chinese market after facing problems selling its phones there.
Is it an alternative plan
With the price of smartphones increasing more and more in the last few years beyond the threshold of $ 1,000, it has become increasingly difficult to convince users to pay these amounts, forcing companies to increase interest in the category of medium and low phones. Google, known only for its leading phones, launched a Pixel 3a phone a few days ago, while Samsung renewed the series of A phones for the middle and low class radically.
The only company flying out of this squadron is OnePlus, which began as a low-and-middle-phone company, but is raising its device prices year after year to reach the leading category, and the phone Oneplus 7 Pro is the biggest evidence.
All companies, regardless of Oneplus's approach, face the same fundamental and fateful problem. If they do not accelerate the creation of new technologies that convince users to spend their money on them, they run the risk of converting these microphones into commodities like the rest of the goods. Their different types are the price after the fundamental differences between them are gone.
If we compare android phones that fall within the same price category and we stripped of the small details that distinguish them from each other we will notice the similarity and convergence, and although there are simple differences but not essential and the user experience is the same in most of these phones, and if companies do not create more differences Which distinguishes it from its competitors, smart phones will become a commodity, the most important characteristic is the price.
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