Market Of The Year 2010: Smart Phones

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2010 IT INDUSTRY ROUND-UP

Market of the Year 2010: Smart phones

By Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

Even though the first smart phones arrived in this country in 2009, this year has been Thailand's Year of the Smart Phone.

Many smart-phone vendors have joined the aggressive rough-and-tumble market with continuous launches of new and more attractive models. For their part, mobile operators have designed and introduced data packages specifically to serve customers whose behavior has been transformed by the quantum leap to smart-phone ownership.

Unofficially, Thailand's market for smart phones is believed to have reached about 1.2 million units, which is about 18 per cent of the total mobile-phone market. Huge demand is expected to see the smart-phone segment grow by 100 per cent in 2011 to represent about 30 per cent of all mobile-phone sales. By 2012, half of all mobile phones sold in Thailand will be smart phones.

Such forecasts follow plans by many more vendors to enter what is seen as a market with huge potential. User behaviour, availability of applications and network improvements all support the booming market, even though there is still no widespread coverage by a commercial 3G network.

The only existing 3G networks are offered by TOT's mobile virtual network operators, and they cover only limited areas.

The huge expansion of social networks in Thailand, especially the leading sites, Facebook and Twitter, has helped to lead the growth of the smart-phone market, transforming the mobile-phone industry.

The official launch of Apple's iPhone 4 was one of this year's smart-phone highlights, and although there is no official figure, it is believed that several hundred-thousand iPhones have already been sold in Thailand, and this estimate excludes grey-market sales.

Global phone-makers Samsung and Research in Motion (RIM) have also been playing a major role. Samsung launched its flagship smart phone, the Galaxy S, this year and has enjoyed good feedback and sales volumes.

The Galaxy S, Samsung's most popular Android smart phone, has helped the Korean company's mobile-phone business to outperform the market in Thailand, with year-to-date growth of 36 per cent by value and 54 per cent by volume, compared with total-market growth of 14 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. Currently, Samsung holds a 32-per-cent share of the market by value and 28.4 per cent by volume. Its success can be attributed to its consistent efforts to offer "a mobile for every lifestyle".

Meanwhile, RIM has continued to launch new BlackBerry models and has successfully created a "BB phenomenon" in Thai society. RIM also held a small developer forum in Bangkok this year with the aim of gathering and building up a community of local application developers for BlackBerry.

When it first entered the Thai market, RIM was still concentrating on corporate sales, but then it created the "BB phenomenon" and became very successful in the local consumer market. The consumer segment is still providing huge growth for RIM in Thailand, and BlackBerry smart-phones are consumer-market leaders both within Bangkok and outside the capital.

Huge demand for smart phones in Thailand also helped to pressure mobile-phone giant Nokia to focus more on its high-level smart phones. It launched the Nokia C7, its second Symbian3 smart phone, following the E8. The company said it would launch two more Symbian3 smart phones, the C6-01 and the E7, before the end of 2010, and it is also planning a sharper focus on smart phones throughout 2011.

Nokia is not only pushing its smart phones, but also its app store, called the Ovi Store. It offers thousands of apps, many of which are free. The most popular among them are games. Nokia is also planning to offer new models that approach the smart-phone market by offering solutions and services such as messaging, e-mail and navigation, so users can experience more mobile-phone applications, rather than limiting their phone use to voice calls.

The booming smart-phone market has sent wake-up calls to many other mobile-phone vendors, such as LG, and PC vendors such as Acer Computer. Both have launched smart-phone models in Thailand, even though neither of them has a big range of smart-phones on the market. Both are planning to introduce new models in 2011.

LG has not yet become an aggressive player in Thailand's smart-phone market. It launched only two models this year, the Optimus GT450 and the Optimus One P500. But it is planning to come out punching in 2011. LG says it will launch more than 10 smart-phone models and is looking for a 25- to 30-per-cent share of the smart-phone market. All of its new models will be Android-based phones.

Market leader Samsung will not rest on its laurels in 2011. It plans to extend its leadership of the overall mobile-phone market by focusing on smart phones using the Android, Bada and Windows platforms. With the aim of winning a 32-per-cent share of the mobile-phone market, Samsung says it will continue its business strategy of offering total mobile solutions to allow consumers to experience the full range of its mobile-technology innovations.

Meanwhile, RIM is turning its focus back to the corporate market, with the additional aim of building a community of local application developers for BlackBerry. Its latest move, focusing once again on its strength among business users, seems to be preparing for a comeback of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 in the Thai market.

The dramatic growth in smart phones has also brought a revenue windfall to mobile-phone operators, because of the huge increase in data usage. All three major operators say the proportion of their revenue coming from data increased in 2010 due to popular adoption of smart phones. They have been quick to design data-package plans to serve widely differing needs among smart-phone users.

DTAC is now aiming to become a "mobile-Internet company", with half of its subscribers using mobile-data services by 2012 or 2013. Currently, about 20 per cent of DTAC's subscribers use mobile data.

The growth momentum in Thailand's smart-phone market seems certain to build next year, with an almost crazy scramble to grab part of the action in providing more devices, services, applications and data packages, as well as higher-quality networks with better speed.

-- The Nation 2010-12-27