News by: Jared Peters 5th December 2013
Latest smartphone market share report by comScore’s confirms the trend we’ve been seeing for a while now; Samsung and Apple continue to dominate the landscape, while most other manufacturers fight for the scraps at the bottom of the pile. The Q3 report shows that Apple lost roughly 0.2% while Samsung saw another growth of 1.3%, which combined puts the two of them in control of 66% of the market, or 2/3 of every smartphone. That’s rough for everyone else. Motorola managed to pull up into third place with 7% of total smartphone subscribers.
Motorola had a fairly large marketing budget for the Moto X, and we’ve definitely seen them ramp up advertising efforts, but it doesn’t look like it’s having too much of an effect on the market. To be fair, they were one of the only Android OEMs that didn’t lose market share, but they didn’t gain much, either. I’m not sure that 500 million advertising dollars was worth a 0.1% increase in market share, but it’s definitely better than losing any market share. I think this might be the combined effect of the “premium” tier of smartphone customers being saturated thanks to Apple and Samsung’s constant barrage of advertising towards that segment, as well as the fact that Motorola doesn’t currently offer many other smartphones besides the Moto X. Sure, they have the Droid line on Verizon, but that isn’t going to help carry the entire smartphone portfolio since it’s only available on one US carrier, however big that carrier may be.
I think now that Motorola’s latest creation, the Moto G, has been officially released, we’ll see a it more positive effect for the company within the next few months. The budget market is much more likely to swing than the high end, especially considering Apple and Samsung haven’t thrown billions at that segment (yet). Since Apple doesn’t really offer a budget device and Samsung really only sells their budget devices off of their premium Galaxy brand name, Motorola has a shot to offer an affordable but excellent smartphone experience with the Moto G.
news source: talkandroid.com
