South Korean original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are seeking to retake their lost share of the smartphone market in China that they’re not willing to give up on despite abysmal results in recent years, recent reports indicate. The increasing accessibility of handset manufacturing technologies and government support for local phone makers led to the likes of Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics rapidly losing market share in the Far Eastern country to Chinese OEMs, but neither company is prepared to leave the market due to its sheer size, industry watchers claim. China currently accounts for almost one-third of the global handset market and is still growing at a steady pace despite showing some early signs of saturation, with many analysts believing this trend will continue in the future. Given the present state of affairs, no major phone maker in the world can maintain its global position in the long run if it ignores China, which is why Samsung and LG are currently in the process of devising new strategies to penetrate this increasingly competitive market where they’re now only marginal players, accounting for approximately three and one percentage points of annual handset sales, respectively.
Samsung is presently working on localizing its offerings for the Chinese market, which is why the firm delayed the release of the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8 Plus in the Far Easter country to late May. The company’s flagship duo will debut in China with a localized version of the Bixby artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that will understand Chinese, its third supported language after Korean and (American) English. The Seoul-based consumer electronics manufacturer has also partnered with a number of popular content creators in the country and will offer exclusive digital products to local customers, recent reports indicate.
Samsung’s domestic rival LG adopted a different approach to regaining its share of the Chinese phone market as the tech giant is presently strengthening its online distribution network in the country, industry sources claim. Details on the company’s efforts to make its handsets more widely available in China are currently unclear, but more information on the matter is expected to be available later this year.