SAMSUNG
But where HTC can do targeted niches, Samsung is the only rival who can do Nokia style scale. Samsung will have a monster year in smartphones. They are nothing if not competitive and this is the ultimate competitive opportunity. Every department and unit in Samsung is now working overtime to take every bit that is on the table. Samsung is the new gorilla of the industry. While it is not a fully-grown gorilla yet, it is the only one with the massive scale in handsets - in its dumbphones unit - meaning production capability, sourcing, distribution, carrier relationships, marketing budgets, customer research etc.
Samsung more than trippled in size last year in its smartphones unit. Now, bearing in mind, this is a giant dumbphone maker, who is shifting its handset customers from featurephones to smartphones, that is not strictly comparable to Apple, RIM or HTC, all of which are pure smartphone makers - but Samsung is a different animal altogether. Let me repeat. They grew by 342% last year in smartphones. If Samsung manages the same growth level this year, they'd be at 85 million smartphones, at 17% and breathing down RIM's neck for third place for the full year.
As Samsung is in heavy growth, that means that by Q4 Samsung would be selling far more than RIM, and would be chasing Nokia for second place, and possibly even challenging Apple for first place! Samsung is definitely the new gorilla of smartphones, and while its still a baby gorilla this year, just watch them play with this market and take it with ease. No matter what the others do, this will be Samsung's year. They were already the fastest-growing maker, with by far the biggest footprint on the dumbpohnes side to add to that, and now, are the maker most perfectly poised to capitalize on the Nokia windfall.
For Samsung the challenge is how to manage the shift from Android to bada. Samsung's bada was launched last year and already has had the world's most successful new smartphone OS launch of all time. They did 5 million bada phones in the first half year, and have targeted 10 million for the second 6 months. With Samsung's Wave smartphones on bada, priced at the low cost end of smartphones, this goes directly head-to-head with what was Nokia's main market segment in smartphones. Where RIM, Apple and to some degree also HTC all aim for high end smartphone customers, as does Samsung's Android phones on its Galaxy series, the bada Wave smartphones are the only major line of smartphones purely aimed at the lower price point of smartphones today. So Samsung should be able to capture the biggest slice of Nokia's 50 million smartphone customer give-away. And bearing in mind, that Samsung had already targeted this year for enormous growth - they had their sales and manufacturing all set up for massive growth - they are also best positioned to take more than their fair share.
Imagine the scenario of a teacher giving a big bowl of candy to the students and makes it a free-for-all. Those kids closest to the table will end up getting more than those kids in the back of the classroom who have to race to the front of the room even to have a chance. And the biggest kids in the class, could muscle in and take more than the smallest kids. Samsung is not only the strongest kid but also the one nearest to the candy bowl. This year will be the coming-out party for Samsung, and they will end the year as the darling of the industry and if they have not yet passed Apple, the pundits will all be falling over each other making predictions of when Samsung will pass Apple and become the biggest smartphone maker in the world.
But yes, the thing to watch with Samsung is the bada/Android balance. I would expect that we'll see several bold targets stated for bada, so that by the end of the year the vast majority of Samsung's smartphone sales will be on bada, not Android.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/03/preview-bloodbath-2-electric-boogaloo-the-smartphone-wars-in-year-2011-will-be-bloodier-still.html
