Tag: smartphone sales

The success of the LG G3 is being credited for a large part of the successes that the company has experienced.

LG Electronics Inc. has been sitting in the shadow of its larger South Korean counterpart, when it comes to leading the top smartphone trends, but it has still managed to be able to carve out its own space within this market.

According to some of the latest figures, 2014 represented considerable progress in the rise of that business.

The smartphone trends at LG looked very good in 2014, at which time industry sources claim that it saw an increase in year over year sales of 25 percent. This greatly had to do with the popularity of the LG G3 model. Last year, this second largest tech company in South Korea was estimated to have shipped 59.6 million mobile phone units. This represented an increase of 25.2 percent over the figures from 2013, which were 47.6 million shipped units.

LG has been a part of global smartphone trends since 2009, when it first entered into that market.

In 2011, LG’s sale of smartphones had already reached 20 million units, said Strategy Analytics data. By 2012, that had increased to 26.3 million units, which shows a rapid rise in the sale of these mobile devices. Within the first half of last year, LG had already released an announcement that said that it had broken its own records in selling smartphones, after having sold 14.5 million of those mobile devices in the first six months. The company, itself, was already crediting the success of the G3 in South Korea for that achievement.

In 2014, the G line smartphones from LG proved to be very popular, including the G3, but also the G3 Beat and the G3 Stylus. That said, another addition to the increase in sales from the mobile technology manufacturer was because of the LG Wine Smart, which was a flip phone that provided users with buttons that would offer a direct connection to KakoTalk, a popular messaging platform.

Still, despite the strong smartphone trends for LG in 2014, it still sits behind its Chinese rivals, Huawei Technologies, and Xiaomi. That said, its forecast for 2015 is looking quite strong and many industry experts are expecting that its shares and profitability will both continue to rise.

A report from IDC has showed that even as it matures in some countries, others are still taking off.

The IDC has now released its report on the growth of the smartphone market for 2014 and it has shown that while mature marketplaces are forecasted to grow by only 4.9 percent, emerging regions are expected to keep up a tremendous rate of 32.4 percent.

Some of the regions of the world are experiencing faster growth than the average reported by IDC.

According to the report, the Indian smartphone market saw a massive 300 percent growth rate in 2013. As only 10 percent of the over 700 million users of cell phones had smartphones at that time, it was only natural that the growth rate be exceptionally high. By the first quarter of this year, the penetration rate of these mobile devices had already reached a much higher 29 percent.

In emerging countries, the dynamics of the growth of the smartphone market are different than in mature regions.

For instance, many emerging marketplaces do not have a broad scale fixed line infrastructure. Therefore, this means that it provides an ecosystem that is much more favorable for the use of mobile broadband technologies for the delivery of high speed internet connections than is the case in mature markets, where that infrastructure is considerably better established.

The demand within emerging regions is, therefore, driving growth in both smartphone shipments and in mobile broadband subscriptions. Two very large and yet highly different examples of this occurrence are going on in India and in China.

In China, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reported that at the end of 2012, there was a 74.5 percent growth in mobile internet users to the most recent figure, which is 81 percent. Clearly, this is a notably higher growth rate and the CNNIC is calling the smartphones the primary driving force for internet use in the country.

On the other hand, in India, Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins, indicated in the report called the 2014 Internet Trends that while smartphone use is tremendous, revenues are very large, and the opportunity is considerable, companies are still seeing tiny margins. At the moment, only 4 percent of the budgets of advertisers in the country is being spent on advertising in the smartphone market.