www射-国产免费一级-欧美福利-亚洲成人福利-成人一区在线观看-亚州成人

US EUROPE AFRICA ASIA 中文
Business / Technology

How $1,000 can create a smartphone brand to challenge Samsung

(Agencies) Updated: 2015-07-15 10:07

Walk through a metal gate, sidestep a pile of boxes, take an elevator to a floor of serviced offices and enter the latest battleground for Samsung Electronics Co.

In a small suite in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, Cathy Chang is helping clients from around the world create their own smartphone brand. Choosing from a menu of options akin to ordering a pizza, Shenzhen Zuoer Technology Co's customers can get into the handset business for as little as $1,000. No experience needed.

Zuoer is among the dozens of little-known Chinese companies that are tapping into a catalog of standardized components to build smartphones from $20 apiece. For a minimum order of 50 units, Zuoer assembles its own plastic outer shell with other manufacturers' LCD screens, circuit boards and batteries, helping any client anywhere take on Samsung in the $410 billion global mobile phone market in less than six weeks.

"The emergence of low-end phone vendors is chipping away at Samsung's share," said John Butler, who tracks the smartphone market for Bloomberg Intelligence. "These new entrants are quite small in comparison with a giant like Samsung, but their collective impact is weighing on Samsung's results and those of other major vendors."

Starting with Google Inc's free Android operating system and adding standardized chips based on technology developed by ARM Holdings Plc, companies such as Zuoer, Shenzhen Oysin Digital Technology Co and Oteda Industrial Co can put together phones without the legions of software and hardware engineers that Nokia Oyj, Motorola Mobility and BlackBerry Ltd relied on a decade ago.

Thanks to touch-screen technology, made popular by Apple Inc's iPhone, they can also eschew the complicated and expensive business of designing and making physical keypads.

This simplification and standardization has opened the manufacturing floodgates, creating a multitude of Chinese rivals for Samsung, Nokia and Motorola. Among them: Xiaomi Corp, which became the world's third-largest smartphone distributor in less than five years, and OnePlus, which developed a 35-country reach in its first two years.

"It is cheaper and faster because the supply chain has become so mature and standardized," Mosetefa Zhang, head of international sales at Oysin, said in a high-rise building in Shenzhen's Huaqianqbei electronics district.

Down the hall from Oysin, the sales offices of yet another half-dozen assemblers are plying products so similar that price has become the main point of difference.

The path to simplicity started a decade ago when MediaTek Inc, a Taiwan-based semiconductor company that dominated the DVD chip business, entered the phone-components market. Instead of selling only off-the-rack chips like larger rival Qualcomm Inc, MediaTek offered reference designs, recipes detailing what other components to buy and how to put them together. Qualcomm later followed suit.

At the same time as MediaTek was creating a new chip business model, Google bought a little-known company called Android Inc that was developing an operating system more flexible than other offerings.

With the two largest challenges taken care of, small teams could suddenly do the work of giant research labs, and making a mobile phone became as easy as building a Lego house.

"You don't need to do the work, we have professional designers and engineers," said Betty Zhao, sales director at UTOP Communication Technology Ltd. As many as 100,000 pieces can be made a month while the company has just two software engineers, she said.

This lower entry barrier has hurt the established names, splitting revenue across more companies, with the combined share of the top-five global mobile phone vendors falling below 50 percent in 2014 for the first time in at least five years, according to Bloomberg calculations.

For Samsung, which remains the No 1 maker of mobile phones, the result has been slowing sales and a slump in operating profit at its handset unit. To combat the challenge, it has revved up business in other departments, building its own smartphone processors and manufacturing those designed by Qualcomm, helping its chip-making unit post a 50 percent boost in first-quarter profit.

"With a variety of choices for consumers and our ability to quickly deliver a wide range of premium new devices and features based on consumer demand, we will actively maintain and expand our leadership," Samsung said in an e-mailed response to questions.

Smartphones are now more of a commodity than their older feature-phone cousins, and average prices for the new-generation handsets have dropped 30 percent in the past five years, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. That has put the devices within reach of most of the 2 billion consumers in China, India and other emerging markets.

It has also put would-be buyers within easier reach of startups like Xiaomi and OnePlus, which have bypassed traditional sales channels such as mobile phone operators and retailers, by promoting their brands online. That leaves owners of the fledgling brands to conduct market research, design their logos and develop marketing materials. In China, even that can be outsourced.

Hot Topics

Editor's Picks
...
主站蜘蛛池模板: 亚洲精品久久久久综合91 | 国产精品欧美亚洲日本综合 | 天堂最新版 | 毛色毛片 | 久久99国产乱子伦精品免费 | 日韩视频在线观看一区二区 | 成人国产精品一级毛片天堂 | 国产精品揄拍一区二区久久 | 在线久草视频 | 一级床上爽高清播放 | 日韩美女免费视频 | 日韩欧美一及在线播放 | 久久久久亚洲精品一区二区三区 | 日本欧美一级二级三级不卡 | 黄色毛片一级 | 精品欧美小视频在线观看 | 一级一级毛片看看 | 三级视频欧美 | 久久精品亚洲综合一品 | 九九热国产精品视频 | 一级特一级特色生活片 | 日本二级毛片免费 | 亚洲精品一区二区三区中文字幕 | 日韩一级欧美一级毛片在线 | 天堂8在线天堂资源bt | 女人十八一级毛片 | 一区二区三区中文字幕 | 国产精品情侣久久婷婷文字 | 亚洲狠狠狠一区二区三区 | 成人欧美日韩高清不卡 | 国产中文字幕在线观看 | 日韩a毛片免费全部播放完整 | 精品国产香蕉伊思人在线 | 久久无码av三级 | 国产在线一区二区三区四区 | 久久亚洲国产精品五月天 | a三级黄色片 | 欧美成人免费在线视频 | 女人张开腿给人桶免费视频 | 久揄揄鲁一二三四区高清在线 | 三级毛片在线看 |