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Tag: smart watch

  • Apple & Samsung continue to dominate the tablet market

    Apple & Samsung continue to dominate the tablet market

    The Coronavirus affected and continues to affect all kinds of businesses. The tech industry is no exception. There are various component shortages, delayed shipments, and delayed product releases, most notably Huawei’s P50 series of phones that were supposed to arrive almost two months ago (expected to arrive this May/June).

    However, the need to work from home has helped certain businesses do much better than before. Unsurprisingly, that’s the tablet and Chromebook market. Tablets had an exceptional first quarter of 2021 (1Q21) with 55.2% year-over-year growth and a total of 39.9 million units shipped, according to initial data from the International Data Corporation (IDC).

    This is exceptional in and of itself, but it’s even more impressive when put into some context. For example, the last time the tablet market grew to such an extent was in 2013, when it surged by 56.9% year over year. Although Chromebooks are becoming more popular, they’ve only managed to sell about 13 million units in 1Q21, up from 2.8. million the year before. Tablets remain more popular, but the competition is real, and we are here for it since it always results in better products and value for the end-user.
    “While vaccine rollouts and businesses returning to offices may slow down the work-from-home trend, we are still far from returning to ‘normal’ working conditions and hence the demand for tablets, especially detachable, is expected to continue for a while,”
    Anuroopa Nataraj, research analyst with IDC’s Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers.

    Unsurprisingly, Apple remains on top of the food chain when it comes to tablet shipments. Its year-over-year growth is 64.3%, and the Cupertino-based company holds 31.7% of the global market share. Samsung has seen a very similar growth – 60.8% year-over-year, and it currently holds exactly 20% of the global market share for tablets.

    However, it’s not Apple or Samsung that saw the most significant growth, compared to last year. Amazon and Lenovo hold the first two spots if we take into account the year-over-year increase in tablet sales. Amazon is first, with 143.0% growth, with Lenovo being close second with a 138.1% surge in shipments.

    As expected, Huawei’s influence in the market has died out due to the fact that its latest devices don’t run Google Services due to the US trade ban. If it weren’t for that, Huawei and Honor would have been one company, and the combined entity likely would have been on the second spot when it comes to market share, second only to Apple.
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  • Xiaomi India to foray into appliances, white goods space

    Xiaomi India to foray into appliances, white goods space

    Xiaomi is all set to convert its India arm into an end-to-end consumer durables company. According to a report, Xiaomi officials are currently identifying potential categories including air-conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, laptops and small appliances like vacuum cleaners and water purifiers for the Indian market. All the products will be smart appliances based on Internet of Things (IoT) or which can connect to the internet and other devices, and operated remotely.

    Xiaomi entered the Indian television market in February this year with products 30-50 percent cheaper than the top three brands — Samsung, LG and Sony. It eventually expanded TV sales to offline stores and started assembling them in India in partnership with contract manufacturer Dixon. It recently announced having shipped more than a million televisions into the Indian market.

    The company will follow the same model for appliances. The products will be priced aggressively in line with its announced strategy of keeping just 5 percent profit margin for itself and start local assembly after gaining some scale to take advantage of Make in India duty benefits, according to the report.

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  • Samsung is No. 1 in world for R&D spending

    Samsung is No. 1 in world for R&D spending

    Samsung Electronics was the No. 1 investor in R&D in the world this year, according a report from the European Commission. The annual R&D Investment Scoreboard report released by the commission analyzes R&D indicators of top companies in the world, based on their most recent accounts and annual reports. The 2018 report studied 2,500 companies worldwide from 46 countries.

    Samsung Electronics invested a total of 13.44 billion euros ($15.2 billion) in R&D this year, an 11.5 percent year-on-year increase compared to last year’s report, when it took third place on the list. This is the first time a Korean company has come in first since the European Commission first published the report in 2004.

    Tailing Samsung in second place was Alphabet, Google’s holding company. It spent a total of 13.39 billion euros. Volkswagen was ranked third at 13.14 billion euros. The list went on to include Microsoft, Huawei, Intel and Apple, all having spent between 9.7 billion and 12.3 billion euros.

    Samsung was the only Korean company within the top 50 R&D spenders worldwide. However, the report showed that, in terms of the ratio of R&D investment to sales – which the report dubbed “R&D intensity” – Samsung fell behind other major companies higher up the list.

    The local company’s R&D intensity was 7.2 percent – lower than second rank Alphabet’s 14.5 percent and Chinese IT company Huawei’s 14.7 percent. It was slightly higher than Apple, however, which had a ratio of 5.1 percent.

    The report also showed that, apart from Samsung, Korea was falling behind in R&D investment compared to neighboring countries Japan and China.

    The 2,500 companies studied for the report had invested a combined 736.4 billion euros, with 14 percent of that total coming from Japan-based companies and 10 percent from China. The top contributors were the United States at 37 percent and the European Union at 27 percent.

    A total of 70 companies from Korea were included in the study. LG Electronics was the only other one mentioned by name, coming in third place in the “Top 3 companies by R&D for the main industries: Other” category after Japan’s Panasonic and Sony.

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  • Xiaomi takes over Meitu’s phone business, manufacture co-branded products

    Xiaomi takes over Meitu’s phone business, manufacture co-branded products

    Meitu and Xiaomi have formed a strategic partnership to jointly launch Meitu-branded phones and other smart devices. The partnership between Meitu – best known for its selfie app – and Xiaomi, a fast-growing technology company with smartphones at its core – will have a far-reaching impact on the brand development of Meitu and Xiaomi as well as the smartphone market as a whole, according to research house IDC. It will allow both companies to expand their customer base and signals a further consolidation in the highly competitive Chinese smartphone market.

    A spokesperson for IDC said that during the last year, Xiaomi has stepped up its efforts to improve the camera capabilities of its products and has done a lot in AI-powered photography research and development. “Leveraging Meitu’s image processing technologies and selfie algorithms will help Xiaomi further boost its AI-powered photography and photo quality and reduce its gap with leading vendors such as Huawei.”

    IDC says Meitu is popular with females which will help draw more women to Xiaomi products which are currently “overrepresented by male users”.

    “Introducing the Meitu brand also enables Xiaomi to offer greater diversity of smartphone products under multiple brands and series, including Redmi, Xiaomi, Black Shark, Pocophone, and Meitu. Xiaomi is gradually forming a multi-brand portfolio targeting different user groups, thereby laying the foundation for it to compete in the market in the long term.”

    The spokesperson said that through Xiaomi’s sales network, Meitu’s software products will reach a larger group of customers via smartphones. “Moreover, licensing its hardware business to Xiaomi allows Meitu to focus on software development and the upgrade of its image processing technologies.”

    And finally, with the top five vendors in China’s smartphone market taking up nearly 83 per cent market share, the growth potential will increasingly diminish for small vendors in areas such as marketing and supply chain resource integration.

    “Going forward, more small vendors are expected to seek strategic cooperation with large vendors and drive consolidation in the China’s smartphone market.”

    Meitu was founded in Xiamen in 2008 as a developer of selfie apps such as MeituPic and BeautyCam, and has been focussed on selfie algorithm development. In 2013, the company ventured into the smartphone market and launched smartphones targeting female users and the selfie market. Despite a higher profit per phone sold and a higher brand premium, the company has become increasingly marginalised in China’s brutally competitive smartphone market due to its meagre shipments.

    According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Meitu only had a mere 0.5 per cent market share in China with shipments of approximately 1.5 million units as of the third quarter of this year.

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