Smartphone vendors upbeat about midrange 5G models
Sammi Huang, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES
Smartphone vendors are upbeat about the midrange segment of the 5G phone market which is set to grow robustly in 2021.
Smartphone brands including Xiaomi, Samsung, Vivo and Realme have already begun making adjustments to their product mixes recently to strengthen their midrange offerings.
With India, Latin America and the Middle East starting to see recovery in smartphone demand, many brands have introduced their latest products to these markets. But competition is expected to remain fierce as Xiaomi has continued to gain market shares with its smartphones that feature strong price-performance ratios.
Xiaomi is set to establish at least one Xiaomi store in each of the cities in China and will release an app in 2021 to interact with customers.
Digitimes Research’s figures show global smartphone shipments dropped 8.8% on year to come to 1.24 billion units in 2020 in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, but shipments of 5G smartphones picked up from 2019’s around 20 million units to between 280-300 million units in 2020.
The top-6 brands worldwide in 2020 were Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo. Samsung and Huawei both saw over 10% on-year declines in 2020 shipments, while Apple and Xiaomi both saw over 10% increases.
