Samsung and Apple ar increasingly dominant as the top-tier smart squall manufacturers. In the meantime, Chinese phone manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE have also go far surface swinging with cheap handsets that people actually ask to buy. And that leaves several troubled giants — HTC, blackberry, Nokia — feeling a squeeze that impart be hard to recover from.
Take HTC, which had to delay shipments of its upcoming flagship HTC single phone. Originally set to release in mid-March, the bon ton right off has to push the release date to late March and early April. The phone itself, revealed in February, is a huge step forth for HTC. It’s sleek and impressive, and very much in challenger with Apple’s i mobilise and Samsung’s galax S4. The One has the possible to put HTC nates in the top ranks of smartphone makers.
But HTC had to delay shipments because of its struggles with photographic camera and hardware suppliers, who no longer consider the company a “tier one customer,” an HTC executive told The Wall Street Journal. And that creates a chicken and egg problem for HTC. Without a hit phone on its hands that its selling in volume, it give the axe’t strong-arm its supply- stove partners to prioritize its contrivances. And without a supply chain prioritizing its devices, it can’t get them to market speedily to begin getting untried customers.
“We are thrilled with the positive response to the new HTC One and are working tirelessly with all of our billet partners to ensure that we can fulfill as many orders as possible. The HTC One will start rolling out to customers from mid-March 2013 with our biggest precession being to get the device to people both quickly and efficiently,” an HTC spokeswoman told Wired. But the fact that the company has to delay because of its supply chain indicates how low of a priority HTC is to its partners.
Nokia and BlackBerry aren’t violate off. BlackBerry 10 was delayed a whole quarter. Nokia went with similar delays when it launched the Lumia 900. Compare that to Apple, which never announces a phone without a specific release date and price, which it always meets (with one cracking white exception). Handset makers should realize that getting the word out there about a phone first isn’t less important than getting the actual phone out.
There are other problems too. While HTC is making both Android and Windows Phone handsets for a wider range of phones, both Nokia and BlackBerry are aquiline on a single operating system. And not ordinary ones. Nokia is dedicated to Windows Phone, which had only 2.9 percent market share in the last quarter of 2012. That’s not promising for the company’s Lumia line, which sell only 4.4 million devices last quarter. For comparison, Samsung exchange 63 million smartphones in that same quarter.
In 2012, all iii companies topped the list of the five major smartphone makers, lined up right beneath Samsung and Apple. But in Q4 of 2012, all triad also lost their places, according to IDC’s latest report. Huawei, ZTE and Sony sold more phones than HTC, Nokia and BlackBerry. And meanwhile the divide between the top cardinal companies and the rest of the pack grew wider.
The thing is, it was the market that relegated HTC, Nokia and BlackBerry to the siemens tier, or worse, lower players. And there’s no throw path back up the ladder. A breakthrough device might do the trick, but given that smartphones have more often than not become iterative affairs, this seems unlikely. Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S4 are essentially improvements on improvements on improvements of already large(p) products. Leapfrogging either of those would be incredibly hard without reinventing the category somehow. HTC, Nokia and BlackBerry all face a steep, uphill climb back to the top. All evidence points to them not making it.
Materials taken from WIRED
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