Author: Lucy

In mobile devices, Samsung’s lead in Indian phones is sliding

| February 12, 2015

The market in the country has belonged to that Korean manufacturer, but it is losing its grip.

Samsung is continuing to hold the lead in the cell phone segment of the mobile devices market in India, but at the same time, the Korean handset maker is starting to lose ground as it faces a growing amount of competition from rivals that are driving forward at full tilt.

Among the competitors that are moving forward in that market are Microsoft (Nokia), Karbonn, Micromax, and Lava.

CyberMedia Research (CMR) has recently released data that has stated that Samsung is currently “losing its earlier firm grip”. It has watched its share in India fall from having been 20.3 percent at the start of 2014, to reach a much lower 16.5 percent by the close of December. The firm’s data was published within its India Monthly Mobile Handsets Market Review, for last year. In the country, mobile devices increased by 4 percent to reach 257 million units more having been shipped in 2014 over the same figure for 2013.

Of all of the shipments of cell phone mobile devices, Samsung shipped 16.5 percent in India.

Mobile Devices - Samsung phones losing ground in IndiaMicrosoft (Nokia) and Micromax each shipped 13.3 percent of the total shipments. That said, CMR released a statement that indicated that “However, Samsung was seen to be losing its earlier firm grip on market, as its share of the market showed a downward trend during the year, as compared to Micromax that gained primarily in April-June 2014, but then continued to remain flat during the rest of the year.”

When the data was collected for that market for the January through March quarter, last year, Samsung had held onto a 20.3 percent share of the shipments, while Microsoft (Nokia) had 17.6 percent of the shipments, and Micromax had 11.2 percent in India.

Approximately 77 million smartphones had been shipped by Samsung last year, making up about 30 percent of the entire cell phone mobile devices market in India. That segment of devices as a whole experienced a growth of 46 percent when compared to the shipments that it had experienced the year before.

Mobile commerce fraud comes with a price to retailers

| February 10, 2015

The results of a new study have shown that while this is already expensive, the problem is only going to grow.

A new report has recently revealed the results of a study that has shown that at the moment, fraud in mobile commerce is costing an average of 3 percent of the total revenues of retailers who are selling over this channel.

Moreover, the faster the growth of this ecosystem, the more the cost of fraud is likely to rise, said the study.

This research was conducted for RSA – an encryption vendor – and TeleSign – a vendor of fraud prevention – and it analyzed the responses of 250 different enterprises that had an average revenue of $2.54 billion. Among them, it was determined that the annual loss as a result of fraud over mobile commerce was $92.3 million. In certain cases, the impact of fraud on m-commerce was a s great as 25 percent of the sales of the retailer over that channel.

This mobile commerce study showed a great deal of insight into the impact of fraud on retailers.

Mobile Commerce - Retail and FraudThe survey was conducted online, and among the respondents, 8.4 said that they had not detected any losses as a result of fraud that had occurred either online or over m-commerce channels. That said, 34 percent of the respondents said that they had lost up to 5 percent of their revenues to fraudulent purchases. Another 13.6 percent claimed that the losses they had experienced from fraud online fell between 11 percent and 25 percent. Just over that amount, 14.4 percent, said that their fraud rate was between 26 and 35 percent. And finally, 11.6 percent experienced a staggering online fraud rate of 36 to 50 percent of revenue over those channels.

Although the overall average losses from fraud was from 6 to 10 percent of online revenues for most companies, when looking specifically at medium sized businesses that had revenues within the range of $500 million to $1 billion, the situation was not as “good”. In that group, the average online rate of fraud was between 11 to 20 percent, according to the research.

When it came to mobile commerce fraud, specifically, it was only the very smallest companies that experienced a rate that was under 10 percent. The average large company lost between 10 and 24 percent of their revenues to fraudulent transactions.