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There is a huge potential market for "cheap" smartphones particularly in developing countries, and because of the nature of iOS, Android is the only viable game
by sgpl 13y ago
There is a huge potential market for "cheap" smartphones particularly in developing countries, and because of the nature of iOS, Android is the only viable game in town. So people will continue to buy subsidized/cheap smartphones for a long time, atleast outside of the US.
Bloomberg recently published a very informed article [1] on the subject where one company, "Micromax increased shipments to 633,000 smartphones in the last quarter of 2012 from 9,990 a year earlier, while [another], Karbonn grew to 304,000 from zero."
Because of the price disparity of phones from Apple/Reputable Android manufacturers, there is a very large untapped market for sub_$100 smartphones in China and India.
[1] http://goo.gl/PHKIH http://goo.gl/PHKIH
- kevin_p 13y agoI know you're mostly talking about cheap phones, but I'm still going to quibble with the other half of your "subsidized/cheap smartphones" point. Subsidised phones are much less common in developing countries because the credit system is less developed. Even where they do exist, they're structured as "buy the phone for $x then get $x/24 off your bill each month for 2 years" rather than the "get the phone now and pay it off over the contract period" system in the EU/US, so they're not a way of getting a phone you couldn't afford to buy outright.