原创 The USD13.50 mobile phone and new trend in mobile phone industry

The USD13.50 mobile phone

and new trend in mobile phone industry

Author: Steven Jiang (Shenzhen Kenah Technology Co., Ltd.)

 Time: 2009-12-17   Transshipment Forbidden

Yesterday, a mobile phone manufacturer called me to introduce their new models---low-end mobile phone, the price is just USD14.00.

I took the mobile phone part by screwdriver to see the main board. The mobile phone adopt the Infineon ULC OS, has a high integration level, just a few components and chipsets.

It is the first choice to adopt the Infineon ULC for to make the super low-end mobile phone.  Spreadtrum has favorable position in Low end mobile; and MTK 6225/6235 chipset is very popular in the Mid-Range Market. Generally speaking, the 3 platforms share about 90% Chinese mobile phone market. in addition, we can find the Coolsand platform in the low-end mobile  phone products occasionally, especially the COPY-NOKIA 1 series.

More and more Chinese manufactures will adopt the other platforms except the MTK. I think is a trend. Because most of the MTK platform adopters face the keen competition in the Mid-Range market, and the mobile phone manufacturers just has little profits. Infineon, Spreadtrum will get more market share. Meanwhile, iphone, Google and Dell will take a variety of development in the high-end mobile phone market.

We can analyze the profit margin to get a clear idea. Let us to do a rough calculation, for example, The TV mobile phone, and the low-end mobile phone,

TV mobile phone            Price: USD39.00-USD49.0// median: USD 44.00   Profits: USD3.00

Super low end mobile phone   Price: USD13.00-USD15.00//median: USD14.00   Profits: USD1.50

Profit margin:

TV mobile phone USD2.5/USD44.00 = 6.8%;

Super low end mobile phone USD1.50/USD14.00 =10.70%

So, the latter is higher about 4 percent than the former.

In a way, we can get the same result from what happens next in mobile phone market. It is obvious there are two demand in the next, one is that existing mobile phone users in the Mid –end market will change a new mobile phone, most of them will select the smart phone, such as iphone, google phone, and the new comer Dell phone.  The other is that the telecom operators select the super low end mobile phones as a point of breakthrough to enlarge the mobile phone owning rate and the percentage of coverage in Developing countries (in China, India, Brazil, and most of the Afric countries).

By the way, I want to say that the Chinese mobile phone made a great contribution to the world’s economy, especially the Developing countries’ economy.