The annual growth in shipments of converged mobile devices such as personal digital assistant (PDA) handsets and smartphones climbed 20 percent in the first quarter of the year in Taiwan, far exceeding the 2 percent increase in the overall handset market, an industry researcher said yesterday.
First-quarter shipments in the overall market rose 5 percent to 1.83 million units from last quarter, market intelligence firm IDC said in a statement released yesterday.
The robust growth in the converged device market in the first three months of the year was driven by improved user interfaces, smaller device sizes and expanded screen sizes, IDC Taiwan analyst John Cheng (鄭若望) said in the statement.
In addition, more stylish features with multiple functions and better multimedia effects, as well as increased memory capacities for consumers to choose from also helped contribute to maintaining stable growth in this market, Cheng said.
Domestic sales of converged mobile devices accounted for just more than 5 percent of the overall mobile phone market in 2006, but the figure grew to more than 9 percent last year, following the launch of Apple Inc’s iPhone and High Tech Computer Corp’s (HTC, 宏達電) Touch smartphones last year, IDC’s statistics show.
Other mobile phone vendors such as Nokia Oyj, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ltd and Samsung Electronics Co had also in the meantime unveiled their converged devices targeted at ordinary customers, without restricting the segment’s customer base to professional consumers or so-called prosumers only.
But Cheng said vendors of this type of handsets would have to make certain price compromises if they wanted to boost the sales of the devices to account for 10 percent, or even 20 percent, of the overall mobile phone market in the long run.
In other words, vendors will need to drive prices much lower to make converged mobile devices more affordable to a broader base of users.
Currently, about 90 percent of the converged mobile devices sold in Taiwan are priced at more than NT$10,000 (US$329.5) per unit, excluding telecom carriers’ subsidies.
Based on IDC’s tallies, sales of these NT$10,000 handsets make up of 80 percent of all converged mobile devices, but they had a share of less than 15 percent of the overall market.
Without lower prices, vendors need to focus on offering greater capabilities and breakthroughs in their products to woo customers, Cheng said in the statement.
IDC Taiwan said it maintained a positive outlook for converged mobile devices, although the overall handset market appeared to be approaching saturation point.
Data from IDC Taiwan also showed that Nokia continued to lead the domestic mobile phone market, closely followed by Sony Ericsson, in the first quarter of the year. Sales of the two vendors accounted for more than half the local market, IDC data showed.
Shipments of Samsung and LG Electronics Co made up almost 20 percent of the market in the first quarter, while HTC led the Taiwanese brand names here, the data showed.
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