BEIJING, May 6 (Xinhua) – Chinese mobile phone brands represented by Huawei are gaining increasing popularity abroad with their innovative features and services.
Despite the shrinkage of European smart phone market in 2018, Chinese smart cell phone brands still acquired about 32 percent of market share with over 60 million units of shipment, up 27 percentage points from 2017, according to latest data from Canalys, a global technology market analyst firm.
For Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., a China-based global leading provider of ICT infrastructure and smart devices, the market share of its smart phone products in the Europe hiked 54 percentage points and its sales volume in the fourth quarter of 2018 took up as high as 23.6 percent of total quarterly sales in the continent.
Given its growth momentum, Huawei’s smart phone sales are likely to rank the second this year and maintain the trend before debut of the next generation of iPhone in September, estimated Canalys.
Other Chinese cell phone brands such as OnePlus and Xiaomi Corporation were also widely welcomed in the European market.
Analysts attributed their eye-catching sales performance to their competitive prices and innovation functions, which gave rise to their attractiveness to consumers from Europe where the threshold to market is relatively lower than in the U.S.
Wang Xiang, senior vice president of Xiaomi Corporation once said the company opened its first European store in Spain in 2017 and hoped to operate more than 150 stores in the country by end 2019.
By taking advantage of their strong advantages in prices, Chinese cell phone makers are expanding their business in the middle- and low-end products field in the emerging market, said Shobhit Srivastava, analyst with Counterpoint Research.
Chinese cell phone producers are likely to further segment the European market and target those who can not afford flagship devices, said Shobhit Srivastava, adding that to divert customers from functional phones to smart phones, relying purely on low prices is not enough.
As a matter of fact, the European market is fairly mature and business expansion in a gradual manner is more suitable given that operators there care much about brand image and consumers are not that sensitive about prices, said an employee of OnePlus.
Under such circumstances, the biggest obstacle for Chinese cell phone brands to enter the European market is crafting their brand power, the employee said.
Apart from this, sales channel coverage remains a big challenge facing Chinese cell phone manufacturers in the Europe, in which markets of most countries are still dominated by the operators.
Even open channels still need to explore and getting subsidies is also a problem in front of Chinese cell phone brands.
By sales channels, west Europe and central and east Europe are different markets. In west Europe, operators acquire nearly a half of the market share but as payment modes there are gradually shifting to payment after service, more space for middle- and low-end smart devices is opened thus creates opportunities for Chinese cell phone brands including Huawei and Xiaomi, held an analyst with Canalys. (Edited by Duan Jing, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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