“The most annoying and misquoted fact about smartphones is the infamous market share number,” Alex Cho writes for Seeking Alpha. “The business school argument is that higher market share will generally result in better returns on investment. But in the specific instance of mobile, perhaps having lower market share may still result in higher returns on investment.”
“The decline of Android is pretty much inevitable as users rarely upgrade their mobile operating system to the latest version. Currently only 1.1% of users are on Android 4.4, which is subpar when compared to the distribution figures for… iOS 7 (74.1%),” Cho writes. “This indicates that users have very little interest in the Android platform… Android’s durable advantage isn’t driven by the power of its software, but more because of the marketing dollars that OEMs [Samsung, LG, Sony and HTC have spent in order to maintain or grow market share. This is partially why Samsung may move to Tizen and break away from Android. If in the event that occurs, Android’s market share figure may fall even further than what my two year model suggests.”
“For the most part Samsung sells more than twice as many phones as Apple at half the price,” Cho writes. “Going forward Android’s market share will decline due to historic patterns along with Samsung’s rumored transition to the Tizen mobile operating system. Android 4.4 hasn’t generated a whole lot of excitement, which further supports my expectation of falling Android market share by 2015.”
Read more in the full article here.
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