So silent the last echoes of the Beijing Olympics. Within two weeks, one of the major newsmakers in the world is a magnificent “Bird’s Nest”. During this time, interest in China and all the Chinese, particularly the highest, soared almost to the heavens.

We also found it interesting topic in China, although in certain aspects. Namely – Chinese cell phone makers and their influence on the global mobile market. Moreover, the influence of companies from the Middle Kingdom has long been very noticeable. Today, it affects not only the scope of the contract manufacturing mobile phones for OEM-ODM-and agreements with leading global companies, but also develop their own original models. Chinese vendors, entrenched in the domestic market for several years actively seeking out international mobile arena. Moreover, to this end, local companies are not averse to buy mobile units is much more well-known corporations. Including these transactions allow a person-promoted brand (before the eyes of examples TCL and Alcatel, CEC and Philips).

Russia is one of the priority markets for Chinese manufacturers of mobile phones. More interesting to get acquainted with them closer, to find out whether they have any competitive advantage over the leading industry players such as Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and others. Interestingly, despite the obvious difference in the classroom and scale of production, companies from the Middle Kingdom and their products have already succeeded in some ways to correct the direction of the mobile industry. Perhaps in the future we expect other surprises … However, it is worth, perhaps, go directly to the heroes of today’s thematic review.

History of the Chinese mobile market

Certainly, the development of the Chinese mobile market has had a tremendous influence the status of China as the world’s assembly shop of various high-tech products. Transfer telecommunications companies of their plants in China, including those led to a sufficiently early development of mobile communications in the country.

Already in 1992, Motorola has built in China, Asia’s largest production capacity for the production of mobile phones. In the future, its example was followed by other corporations such as Siemens, Ericsson (later – Sony Ericsson), Nokia and others. However, the dominance of foreign manufacturers has led to insufficient active development of the Han Chinese companies. As a result, the first real Chinese GSM mobile phone was manufactured in China only in 1996. This is significant for the Chinese domestic market event occurred through the efforts of staff of the Institute for Information Industry.

However, more Chinese manufacturers are hopelessly lost the world’s leading companies. Thus, all the domestic cellular market by 1997, there were only five actual Chinese companies.

Realizing the prospects of deploying cellular networks in the country with such a huge population, foreign companies did not stint on investment in the production of mobile phones. Actively building factories for the production of mobile phones, including in special economic zones like Shenzhen. Thus, for the period from 1999 to 2002, foreign companies have invested over 10 billion dollars in the development of mobile phone production in China. Of course, the lion’s share of production of these plants was sent for export, however, and the internal Chinese market is not suffering from a shortage of supply from world producers.

Another impetus to the development of mobile industry served as China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. In order to resist further enhance the foreign companies in connection with this, 17 Chinese manufacturers of mobile phones even united – in the same year – in the alliance China Mobile Communications Association. The purpose of this neoplasm was the unification of efforts in research and development, as well as issues related to logistics and distribution of finished products.

This consolidation has led to certain results. In 2001, the share of Chinese phone manufacturers in the domestic market amounted to no more than 10%. But by 2003 it had risen to 40%.

No less interesting is the question of the standards of cellular communication in China. Naturally, GSM has been and remains the dominant standard. At the same time for several years now is a lot of conversations about the deployment in the country networks of third generation 3G. However, in spite of today’s existing technology WCDMA (UMTS) and CDMA2000 U.S. company Qualcomm, the PRC government has made a bet on developed by Chinese company Datang Telecom Technology original standard TD-SCDMA (Time Division – Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access).

Using this standard in the domestic Chinese market of mobile communication would avoid the royalty for the use of proprietary standards, CDMA and UMTS. However, even the developer of the standard TD-SCDMA, the company Datang Telecom Technology, acknowledges that the technology is inferior to existing solutions. Nevertheless, in the early decades of the development of the standard TD-SCDMA went very active. Datang Telecom Technology managed to create a pool of many telecommunications companies such as Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Nortel, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, local developers Huawei Technologies, Legend, Soutec, China Electronics, China Putain and ZTE. The German company Siemens has become a strategic partner of Datang Telecom Technology, investing in the development of TD-SCDMA standard, the order of 200 million euros.

However, the introduction of cellular networks of the third generation was much more lengthy process than expected. At the time, representatives of the International Olympic Committee had promised that the cellular network of the third generation will earn in the country before the Olympic Games in Beijing. That did not happen, and testing of national commercial mobile network standard, TD-SCDMA, to identify and eliminate potential technical problems that had just begun. Serious delays were caused mainly by the immaturity of the standard TD-SCDMA, a lot of time spent on the refinement of technology.

However, and market GSM-making is very interesting. The leader of the Chinese cellular market is the operator of China Mobile Communications Corporation, controlled by the Chinese government (Ministry of Information Technology of China). The company was formed in 2000 through the provision of the state telecommunications company, China Telecom and the first years became a record number of subscribers. Today it is the largest cellular operator in the world. Suffice it to say that the number of subscribers of China Mobile than the U.S. population (more than 376 million people), and a market capitalization of more than 300 billion dollars. In addition to the domestic market, the operator is actively developing and other Asian markets for mobile communications.

Another leading operator of China is also a state-owned China Unicom. This statement is remarkable in that a few years ago began to develop a line of IP-telephony.

The total number of subscribers in China now exceeds 600 million people (almost twice the number of users of fixed telephone) – an impressive figure. Nevertheless, given that China’s population exceeds 1 billion people, mobile telephony market in the country is still far from saturation. Together with India, China is the fastest growing mobile market. Although, in fairness, it should be noted that India still lags far behind China in this regard – to date, the customer base in this country does not exceed 300 million people.

Obviously, to provide all these hundreds of millions of subscribers in China, mobile phones just to foreign producers such as Nokia, Samsung and others, not under force. Chinese companies also play an important role in ensuring public offerings for mobile communications.

Domestic mobile phone market in China today – players and solutions

Today the share of foreign companies in the domestic mobile market remains high. Market leaders are – as everywhere – Finnish Nokia, U.S. Motorola and Sony Ericsson. However, Chinese companies have strong positions. Along with leading players, such as Shenzhen Zhonxing Telecom (ZTE), Huawei Technologies, Amoi, Bird, there are dozens of smaller manufacturers.

Moreover, the Chinese mobile phone market, despite the continued high rate of development, today there is a clear overabundance of producers. Thus, already in the past year the number of companies licensed to manufacture mobile phones has exceeded 80. But small companies are no longer able to maintain a high rate of production of mobile phones in response to falling profitability. As a result, they are forced to merge with larger players or even withdraw from the market, minimize or sell produce. However, this happens not only with small companies.

Thus, in April this year the company Lenovo, known worldwide as a manufacturer of notebook ThinkPad (legacy IBM), but at the same time producing and mobile phones, announced the sale of its mobile unit for $ 100 million.

In this connection it must be recognized that the Chinese mobile phone market is gradually entering a phase of consolidation and stagnation, decline in profitability due to release phones. While it is this fact does not affect the volume of handset sales. Last year, the number of vehicles sold on the domestic Chinese market totaled 101 million devices. This year, plans to sell 122 million mobile phones and 142 million – next year.

Clones

In an effort to reduce costs, many Chinese manufacturers, especially far from the leading positions, go to the various steps. Some of them did compromise the Chinese companies as producers of independent mobile solutions. As we know from other fields (hours, MP3-players, other digital equipment), small Chinese firmochki not averse to copy the design well-known manufacturers. Further minimize the costs lead to the use of extremely cheap materials shell. It also leads to the majority of companies use one or two platforms (in particular, Spreadtrum Chinese and Taiwanese MediaTek). But disappointingly low level of quality control in production, localization of products (if they are supplied to foreign markets) completes the picture.

jpg

As a result of all this leads to an enormous number of low-quality mobile phones, clones, which discredit the Chinese manufacturers as the original developers of mobile phones. Meanwhile, the domestic Chinese market is enough and such companies that offer really interesting and high-quality solutions, although at a higher price, comparable to the cost of products known manufacturers of mobile phones.

If we talk about counterfeit products known companies, then you can sort out some key points. Most cloned innovations in the mobile industry, the flagship product lines of manufacturing companies, and just expensive phones (including Class Luxury, such as Vertu, for example). Intensified subjected to cloning and fashionable at the moment the model. Thus, at various times been popular counterfeit Motorola RAZR V3, Sony Ericsson K750i.

At the same time from the cloned phone in the forgery remains except a hint of design, photographic resemblance to the original is not necessary. The software is filling completely different. In particular, none of the fake Nokia you will not find a real working Symbian OS. In some cases, the design of the main menu, icons repeat the original, but nothing more.

Naturally, neither of which the outstanding quality of materials shell not speak. Chinese manufacturers can improve the quality of manufacture, use ????????? plastic, but all this would increase the cost of production. The same applies to technical characteristics. In a cheap knockoff top models, by definition, can not install the same camera module or the same quality screens. In the most “severe” cases and simplifies the design at all – for example, fake “sliders» Nokia N95 and the Nokia 8800 is miraculously transformed into monoblocks. Like producers of clones and create hybrids, borrowing design and specifications of two or more devices.

“Generic traits” characteristic of the Chinese manufacturers today are also able to influence the nature of manufactured solutions. As a result, phones acquire such parameters, which are never met in the original models – touch screens, the ability to work with two SIM-cards, a few speakers and so on. By the way, not always for the users phone-clone is a drawback.

Special mention deserve the name of cloned vehicles. Their producers prefer to produce vehicles under the names resonate official: Veptu, Anycoll, Amycoll (from Anycall – Samsung brand for the Asian market), Nokla, N [] kia, Nckia, Nokir, Sang Ericsson, Suny Ericssun and the like. The index of models may vary in very wide range, from the real signs copied devices (N95, for example) to the most fantastic (Sony Ericsson F1). Much credit for this belongs to the Internet. Thanks to insiders from the camp of companies that produce information about the future premieres in the network is laid out well before the official announcement. This allows creators to stay ahead of counterfeiting, and by the time the novelty of its clones may be a long time to sell. Exactly one year before the official announcement emerged clone of Nokia N79. Of course, with a completely different design and performance, inspired by the then smartphones N-series.