Spurred by iPhone sales, the nation’s smartphone market is expanding from a niche market into a mass one as it picks up momentum, posing a threat to netbook sales, IDC Taiwan analysts said yesterday.
“The promotion by telecom operators through subsidies and financing, along with the facilitation of a more mature ecosystem, has been the main engine behind the domestic smartphone market’s growth,” the market researcher’s telecommunications analyst John Cheng (鄭若望) told a media briefing.
The firm expects smartphone sales in Taiwan to climb by 78 percent to 1.6 million units this year from 900,000 last year, outperforming the overall mobile phone market’s meager 2.9 percent growth this year, Cheng said.
Cheng expects HTC Corp’s (宏達電) Android-powered smartphones to see the strongest growth along with better subsidies and application services by telecom operators in coming quarters to take up a 25 percent market share by the year’s end, up from 17 percent in the first quarter of this year.
Nokia, however, will remain the biggest smartphone brand in Taiwan with an anticipated market share of 30 percent by the year’s end, down from 41 percent in the first quarter, he said, adding that the feature phone-oriented vendor will be able to maintain its dominance in the smartphone market with a lower pricing strategy.
That will be matched by Apple Inc’s iPhone, whose market share is expected to jump to 30 percent by year’s end, up from 26 percent during the last quarter, following the recent launch of iPhone 4, he added.
“Telecom operators have come to the realization that their past promotion of iPhones hasn’t been as profitable as they imagined,” Cheng told the briefing yesterday.
The broader acceptance of smartphones has put the squeeze on netbook sales, whose growth momentum has gradually stabilized at a 20 percent market share in the domestic PC market, another analyst Dickie Chang (張祐菖) said.
Sales of netbooks by telecom operators declined by 34 percent year-on-year to total 32,866 units in the first quarter, while sales by retailers also quickly dropped by 42 percent to total at 82,309 units in the first quarter from a year earlier, IDC statistics showed.
“The requirement of a broader bandwidth at base stations for netbook users [to be able to surf the Internet] has forced telecom operators to [change their minds and instead] subsidize smartphone sales, which bring in further voice-based revenues,” Chang told yesterday’s media briefing.
Overall, IDC forecast the nation’s IT spending will experience a strong recovery this year to total 5.8 percent growth from last year.
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