Lenovo set for Chinese smartphone crown in 2013

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By Phil Muncaster, 23rd November 2012

Chinese PC giant Lenovo is set to oust Samsung as the top smartphone manufacturer in the People’s Republic by next year, thanks to success at the mid-to-low end of the market, according to Gartner.

The analyst said in its top five 2013 predictions for IT in China that Lenovo, which earlier this year displaced HP as the world’s biggest PC manufacturer, has seen strong momentum in its mobile business.

Its smartphone market share rose from just 1.7 per cent in Q3 2011 to 14.8 per cent a year later, way ahead of Apple’s 6.9 per cent and just shy of Samsung’s 16.7 per cent.

Gartner had the following to say:

It is the only local smartphone player that can compete with global top brands in China, thanks to its household brand recognition, nationwide distribution, strong portfolio and reasonable pricing. The brand is positioned at the mid-to-lower end which will drive much of its future growth, and this is where global brands are less competitive. It will also gain share from open markets where its brand and distribution are better established than local competitors.

Success in the Chinese smartphone market could propel Lenovo to similar heights on the global stage, given the huge potential for growth in its domestic market – which has already overtaken the US as the world’s biggest.

Market watcher TrendForce reckons Chinese buyers will shell out for a whopping 294 million smartphones in 2013.

Lenovo’s strategy of targeting the cheaper end of the market, which is also being done with reasonable success by home-grown rivals ZTE, Huawei and others, is a canny one given the huge numbers of feature phone users in China who will be looking to upgrade on a budget to a smarter device.

The firm has already broken ground on a new mobile R&D centre in Wuhan and has even been recruiting ex-Motorola engineers made redundant after Google’s decision to close down the firm’s R&D plant in Nanjing. ®

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Posted Friday 23rd November 2012 04:13 GMT

Mikel

Lenovo is making the hard turn

They bought IBM's PC business right before the Vista launch and turned that lemon into lemonade - taking themselves to top dog in the PC client biz. There's scant profit in it, but they're driving units and spoiling the fun for all the other Windows-only PC vendors - and that's a win for China and Lenovo to break the monopoly by driving the profit out of it. HP should have parted with their Windows PC business too before Windows 8 launch as Apothaker said, if there were a buyer; now it is too late.

But the growth is in smart mobile devices - especially in China where most people don't even have PCs and never did. Android has 90% of the China mobile phone market now, and nearly as much in tablets. Most of those people who never had traditional PCs now never will. Lenovo is ready to make a profit now, and they've found a way. When they leverage their homegrown MIPS technology chips and software development prowess they should surpass the West in the general availability of technology in about five years. But five years from now in the West an entire K-16 education will be something we just assume everybody over the age of 8 has on their person so, meh.

Lenovo and China will continue to export this of course using the "thousand paths" model, and make good money that Western methods of Intellectual Property war cannot stop. Battalions of lawyers cannot stop 100,000 vendors and eBay.

It helps the Chinese citizen that this stuff is battery powered and can be charged with a solar cell. Their power infrastructure isn't the best. India is in the same boat there. India is going whole hog on the Android tablets also, subsidizing the Aakash II tablet to $20 for students, and their target is a half billion students in the next few years.

There is a cost in the availability of technology. An uncensored copy of Wikipedia in English is about 10GB. It fits on an SDHC card that can be hidden under a postage stamp, in a bar of chocolate, in a battery, and so on. That can be uncompressed, viewed, copied on any one of these devices. The proliferation of these devices means that the Chinese government is about to lose their control of the flow of information. They will find themselves forced to move into our dynamic world of communications whether they want to or not. There will be change and they need to find the smoothest possible way to embrace it - a challenge I don't envy.

Posted Tuesday 27th November 2012 08:01 GMT

N13L5

Re: Lenovo is making the hard turn

" The proliferation of these devices means that the Chinese government is about to lose their control of the flow of information."

The Anglo American banking cartel that owns pretty much all mainstream media sure hasn't lost its control over the flow of information in the west in spite of Wikipedia.

Admittedly, they have a much more flexible method of dealing with information they don't like. Should journalists publish anything about their activities, they get fired with one phone call - if they're lucky... If they really annoyed somebody, they'll find their children dead the next day.

TV has brainwashed people into dismissing everything out of the ordinary as a "conspiracy theory" and laugh it off anyway.

The rich and powerful getting together, colluding to expand their power? Unthinkable, impossible, of course.

Ever looked at Forbes' list of the richest people? The really rich are not in that list, they own Forbes and the list is another decoy.

Just saying, U.S. and EU is hardly better than Russia or China. Only in China, the government openly applies their measures in plain sight, while in the U.S. there's a political theatre front to entertain / distract people, while hiding the scary people who are really in power.