Beleaguered Samsung’s phone shipments are stagnating
“‘Smartphones have now become a commodity.’ An executive at Samsung Electronics has attributed the failure of the Galaxy S6 Edge to the ‘commoditization’ of smartphones,” Lee Jeong-hun reports for The Hankyoreh.
“The company dispensed with the replaceable battery of previously successful models and poured billions of dollars into developing a metal case and a curved screen, but the results did not live up to expectations,” Lee reports. “In the end, these big changes did not make much of a difference to consumers.”
“The slump in smartphones led to a drop in revenues,” Lee reports. “Revenues at Samsung Electronics last year were projected by KTB Investment & Securities to be around 200 trillion won (US$168.1 billion), or about 6 trillion won less than the previous year (206 trillion won).”
“The company has tightened its belt, freezing salaries for executives and employees and slashing its marketing budget. This should nudge operating profit up by about 1 trillion won,” Lee reports. “But Samsung’s difficulties are unlikely to go away this year, because of the downturn in the market. The smartphone market posted a single-digit growth rate for the first time, and the average selling price of units continues to fall.”
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, that’s too bad, isn’t it? 🙂
Thermonuclear.Samsung’ difficulties aren’t because of “the downturn in the market.” They have to do with a total lack of foresight combined, of course, with a culture of theft:
Shackled to Android, Samsung has no point of differentiation. Apple will continue to take unit and the rest of the profit share from Samsung in the market segment in which they compete, and the bottom feeders will continue to take unit share as well. Tizen was Samsung’s only real hope, but they couldn’t manage to pull off such a large undertaking or, really, much of anything beyond mass producing inferior iPhone knockoffs. The world now sees: iPhone is the dream. If they have to settle for an Android phone until they can achieve iPhone, they can get the same thing Samsung offers at much lower prices from myriad Chinese Android handset assemblers (who are also knocking off Apple iPhones’ trade dress left and right).
