The No-Name Companies Selling More Phones Than Samsung, LG, and Apple Combined

[marmar]

from The Atlantic:



The No-Name Companies Selling More Phones Than Samsung, LG, and Apple Combined

By Alexis Madrigal
Sep 16 2011, 1:55 PM ET 13


MicroMax. Spice. Tianyu. Maxx Mobile. Videocon. Karbonn.

These are some of the hundreds of small cell phone makers that are eating up market share across the developing world. By Gartner's latest quarterly numbers, the top 10 cell phone makers -- including all the big names you know like Nokia, Samsung, LG, Apple, RIM, and HTC -- only control about 64 percent of the market. Since 2004, cell phone makers outside the top 10 have doubled their market share.



The sheer number of phones these smaller players are producing is staggering. They sold 153 million units, including the very popular grey market phones in China. The Shenzhen area alone pumps out one billion phones per year, according to a China Daily article. One city, 1,000,000,000 phones!

Tech 2020Just who are these companies? There are several tiers of companies. At the bottom are thousands of mom-and-pop factories that sell some small number of phones. It's unclear how many of them there are because they often sell into the gray market, but they number in the thousands, so the total number of phones they sell is quite large. We're talking tens of millions of phones. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-no-name-companies-selling-more-phones-than-samsung-lg-and-apple-combined/245232/

[FarCenter]

1. Apple does not make phones; the iPhone is made by Foxconn and Pegatron n/t

[Old and In the Way]

2. I highly doubt there are any mom-and-pop factories manufacturing cellphones.

What mom-and-pop are doing are turning out manufactured cell phones with a different product silkscreening with renamed instruction manuals/packaging. These phones are most likely real cellphone factory rejects from the major OEMs that can't be sold through regular channels because of some cosmetic/functional defects. So these phones, rather than being destroyed, are wholesaled out to these type of operations where they can be repackaged and sold at or below cost. There's no warranty or liability traceable to the OEM. It's a big freakin' business.