Samsung edges out Motorola in cellphone sales
By Susan Mernit 
posted December 4th 2004 3:08PM
posted December 4th 2004 3:08PM
Do you care that Samsung and Motorola
have been locked in a heated battle to be #2 in the $100 billion dollar a year cell phone market? Maybe not, but
can we say that the fact that this quarter Samsung's (finally) inched ahead of Motorola with 13.8 percent market share,
compared to Motorola's 13.4 percent,is sort of a big deal given that Samsung hasn't been a major player for all that
long? Their next target: Nokia.
You know, I like both Motorola and Samsung phones (and I've owned both), but Samsung has just seemed a little more in tune with the market lately. And unless they've got some sort of stealth marketing campaign that gets under your skin without you noticing, I don't even remember them doing a whole lot of advertising. I do remember those ultra-annoying "Hello Moto" Motorola ads, which make me not ever want to buy a Motorola phone again.
This surprised me. I thought Sony Ericsson would be #3. But maybe I'm just looking at this from a UK point of view where SE has a good grip on the market. There was a time about a year ago when almost everyone I knew had a T610...
Samsung does seem to have a good grip on the market lately. However, the "next target: Nokia" is a bit exaggerated, as Nokia is still a full 20% market ahead of them. That means Samsung would have to more than double their market share. Granted, it could happen, but not likely for a while. And SE is still way down there. I remember reading earlier last year when SE had 4% of the market, they needed 7-8% to be profitable, and yet they were saying that by 2006 they fully expected to be the market leader. Right. And I'm Bill Gates.
Nokia is still ahead like what Ricky said. A little exaggeration is made in the statement, "Next target: Nokia". This doesn't eliminate the fact that Samsung could, in theory, take over Nokia in 2-3 years time. Given that Samsung grabs full support from the Chinese market, Nokia... is really an inch on top of them.
While Motorola continues to innovate, with it's ultra-thin Moto Razr, MPEG4 support and the introduction of it's proprietary A-GPS technology, it is clear that Motorola is losing ground in the marketplace. This is especially true in the fastest growing market, China, where Samsung gained nearly 5% in the CDMA/China market in the third quarter. It will be interesting to see how Motorola plans to translate innovation into market share.
where can I get this model from the pic?
it's aWe5oME!
If Motorola actually manages to wake up and fix the problems with their yet-to-be-released MPx (quadruple the RAM, put in a much faster processor, improve the camera quality and give it video capture capability, make the phone quad-band), and then actually releases the stupid thing, and then manages to get all the problems with their MPx 220 ironed out as well - (they have a lot of work to do with both phones) - I think they would manage to gain the .5% and more of market share to edge out Samsung.
Motorola would make a really big impact with these two phones if they can manage to iron out all of these problems.