LG Electronics Inc intends to secure 10 percent of Taiwan’s cellphone market of about 7 million units through its series of handsets, which would translate into between 650,000 and 700,000 units sold by the end of this year, a company official said yesterday.
The South Korean electronics maker has a 6.7 percent market share in Taiwan and the company is optimistic it can achieve 10 percent market share by the end of the year, said Finshen Chen (陳川原), vice president of LG’s mobile phone division in Taiwan.
“LG is currently No. 5 in Taiwan in terms of share value and unit share, behind HTC Corp (宏達電) and Motorola Inc in terms value and unit respectively. But it continues to be profitable,” Chen said.
Market share is determined by the value and unit matrices. Value refers to the total number of units sold multiplied by the selling price, while unit refers to total units sold.
Chen made the remarks at a product launch ceremony for a new line of ice cream-inspired mobile phones.
The new phone, known as the LH-5000, is based on second generation (2G) global system for mobile (GSM) technology, an unusual step back in a predominantly 3G market.
“If you look at the situation from an operator’s standpoint, you will see that in Taiwan, voice plans constitute 90 percent of the revenue stream for local telecom carriers, while only 10 percent of their revenues come from non-data plans,” said John Cheng (鄭若望), a researcher at market researcher International Data Corp.
“From an end-user point of view, launching 2G phones focusing on consumers’ basic voice communication needs does have market appeal, as most people in Taiwan use their cellphones only to talk and send instant messages,” he said.
Moreover, aside from voice plans, Cheng said non-voice plans typically include functions such as short message service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), mobile Internet and music download.
In Taiwan, SMS takes up more than half of the business in non-data plans, “which makes one wonder just exactly how big the business for non-voice plans is, not counting the SMS portion,” Cheng said.
“The question is not so much why LG is coming out with 2G phones, but rather why so many manufacturers keep rolling out 3G smartphones,” he said.
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