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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

According to Counterpoint Research Samsung is #1, Second is BBK Electronics with 20% of the global smartphone market and is close to becoming the largest manufacturer in the near future. Brand comparisons ignore BBK Electronics because they sell multiple brands: One Plus, Oppo, Vivo and Realme.

Huawei is ahead of Apple because Huawei sells also HONOR branded smartphones.

          2019Q3

    Samsung  21%
   (*BBK     20%)
    Huawei   18%
    Apple    12%
    *Oppo     9%
    Xiaomi    8%
    *vivo     8%
    *Realme   3%

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...

Chinese brands have almost 50% global market share.

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Good info. Still I think that they're not making a lot of money and the market's contracting too. Looks a bit like the situation with laptops about 10 years ago. They were dirt cheap and abundant.

--- edit ---

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/12/19/apple-earned-66-o...

66% to Apple, 17% to Samsung and the rest is fighting for the scraps. Which is actually better than a while ago where Apple + Samsung > 100% because the rest was losing money. Already quite a few brands have left the market.

When people ask me if they should buy Apple, I tell them it's overpriced for the hardware you get. Your linked article proves my point quite nicely. But then I follow that up with the value is in the software, if you like/are familiar with Apple software, then buy Apple despite the cost.

I prefer Android and Linux, so I avoid Apple products for myself.

Some of it is the price premium, but Apple also enjoys some efficiencies that the Android clone makers don't. The more efficient iOS and smaller variation in hardware over their more limited number of models means they can lower costs while still putting out a top shelf product.

Tight control of the supply chain from top to bottom pays dividends over the years.

Yes, that's a good point. Their scale, vertical integration, and low number of distinct models do likely give them a margin advantage.

Are you living in the dream California? There are lots of places out of California they can't afford iPhone, or can't afford any phone more than $200, and that's the reality world. So, let Apple make money from those rich consumers, and let Chinese manufactures to make money from the other non-rich consumers.

I think the point is the Chinese manufacturers are making minuscule amounts from non-rich consumers. Most of the money is being made by Apple

The value is the fact that anyone can click on anything in iOS and not have to worry about malware or anything other than restarting the phone. Yes, the functionality may be limited, but my mom was never going to use the extra functions.

Indeed. Familiarity with the environment, features, and such is the biggest selling point when I give recommendations.

Plus, iOS across all your devices tends to "just work" way better than trying to stitch together things across environments via 3rd party apps or web widgets. So if you're already in the iOS ecosystem, just keep extending it.

Of course, the opposite is sorta true too. If you're heavily invested in Android, Android devices will tend to work well together. But with a bit more manual massaging sometimes.

Windows actually had the best across device seemless integrations out of all the offerings. Too bad they didn't make enough market share to make a dent.

What would be a comparable Android phone to Apple's flagship model--not specs, but build quality?

I'd love to take a look at non-apple options.

> it's overpriced for the hardware you get.

That's only a problem when you view a product as just a bunch of discrete parts' summed value. A MacBook Pro is a macOS dongle that also happens to be one of the - if not the - best ultrabooks you can get.

Does Huawei need to make money to survive?

October 16, 2019:

“ Huawei announced on Tuesday its revenue hit 611 billion yuan, approximately $86 billion, for the third quarter, a jump of 24.4% over the same period last year.

In a statement short on numbers, the company also said its net profit margin for the period was 8.7%.

The company added its smartphone business had shipped 185 million units over the three quarters for the year to date, an increase of 26% year on year.

On 5G, the company said it had signed 60 commercial contracts and shipped over 400,000 5G Massive MIMO antennas. ”

https://www.zdnet.com/article/huawei-revenue-up-by-almost-on...

Do you know what accounting standards those numbers are based on?

I suspect they could run large losses for a long time because their value to China isn't entirely contained in their P&L statement.

Let's not forget that China also is ~40% of the market.

Not quite 40 percent of the market. According to [1], where there are 6.4 billion people and 2.7 billion smartphone users in the top 50 countries, Chinese represent 29% of smartphone owners. In the very long term, assuming use in every country stabilizes at 80% of the population, they're looking at 22%.

I think the more interesting metric to watch is India. With 27% of their population in 2018 owning a smartphone (compared to 55% in China and ~80% in more wealthy Western nations like the US) they're likely to demonstrate meteoric rise in the next few years while Chinese adoption tapers off asymptotically towards the limit. The current 13% representation will rise towards 21%, causing the effective market share of Chinese smartphone owners to drop towards 22%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphon...

> Chinese brands have almost 50% global market share.

if I read it correctly, they counted number of units sold, and not actual sales amount in USD.

> Chinese brands have almost 50% global market share.

You can say that Chinese phones have 90%+ of global market.

Samsung still manufactures in China, it just closed its own factories there. OEMs and CMs took over manufacturing for them.

Only their cheapest models are made in Hanoi and Seremban. Some of their domestic market models are still made in Gumi.

Do you know of any phones that are 0% Chinese?

Hard to give an answer for this type of question. Do you mean to say, like the device altogether with the parts that make up the phone isn't China sourced? Or do you mean to say the device is from a non Chinese company and is manufactured outside China? The answer could be a big NO as China sourced parts or process are involved in pretty much everything that the world consumes in this age.

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