Apple Takes the Battle Home to Samsung, Android OS still Leading
By Eunice Nze-Peters
The Cupertino, California based iPhone maker, Apple has become a bigger threat to its Korean based counterpart Samsung. Using the same competitive edge Samsung used against it, Apple is presently eating away Samsung Electronics’ dominant position in its home front of South Korea with its new iPhone 6 series which has larger screen of 4.7-inch (iPhone 6) and the 5.5-inch (iPhone 6 Plus).
Foremost research company, Counterpoint Research reports that consumer demand for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices has pushed Apple to capture a third of the smartphone market in South Korea, a country where rival Samsung has long been dominant.
This is the first time that a foreign brand has gone beyond 20% smartphone market share in the country and Apple’s share of about 40 percent if there had been better supply of the popular models. Counterpoint analyst, Tom Kang said, “If there was a better supply of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus 64 GB and 128 GB models, then Apple’s share could have climbed to the 40 per cent level”.
Before then, Samsung had rushed the launch of the Galaxy Note 4 in South Korea, probably, because it wanted to beat the larger-screened iPhones to the market and snatch some momentum. However, research statistics has shown that Samsung has not done much in terms of succeeding.
For some years now, Apple and Samsung have clashed extraordinarily in the history of business, their legal war costing more than a billion dollars and spanning four continents. Beginning with the secret project that created the iPhone and the late Steve Jobs’s fury when Samsung which was an Apple supplier, brought out a similar device.
While Apple is expanding into emerging economies like China in a big way, it is doing so by targeting high-end consumers. This means that it is only the manufacturers of higher-end android devices, like Samsung, that are losing out as a result of that.
Despite all these, Strategy Analytics revealed lately that Android reached a huge new milestone in 2014 because new figures show that Android isn’t going anywhere, at least not anytime soon. For the first time ever, more than 1 billion devices were shipped with the Android OS.
This record-breaking lead means that Android’s future is assured for years to come. This does not mean that Apple is losing out as Apple’s platform is still consistently more profitable than Google’s, with iOS users spending more on apps. But in the numbers game, Android is undeniably winning especially in the lower end of the market.
But for hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, Apple devices are far out of reach. Unless Apple dramatically rethinks its pricing strategy, they will likely remain so for years to come.
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