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发帖数: 9452 | 1 1:01 PM
Smartphone market share surveys from IDC and Kantar have shown for a long
time that the Android phone volume surge is leaving the iPhone in the dust
in major growth markets from Brazil to India. But one thing that Apple has
had on its side has been the propensity of iPhone owners to consume far more
content than Android phone owners. One argument has been that it does not
matter if iPhone has a 5% share vs. Android’s 40% share if Apple (AAPL)
still dominates in app revenue generation and browsing volume. Content is
king. Another argument is that it does not matter who moves the most units,
since only hardware margins count. Here Apple reigns supreme.
In the long run it’s difficult to say whether selling smartphones at
extremely high margins is more important than dominating mobile content. As
consumers keep shifting their precious entertainment consumption minutes to
smartphones from television, print media and video games, the value of
owning the mobile browsing and mobile application markets increases. Samsung
(005930) is playing the deep game of flooding the world market with
hundreds of millions of Android phones, most of them cheap, some of them
very expensive. The goal is to blanket the globe with Samsung devices and
bet that the content consumption of Android devices can catch up with Apple
in aggregate.
That is why it’s interesting to see how different research houses started
to detect clear signs of Android surge in content consumption in 2012.
According to AppAnnie, Google Play showed 48% download growth over the
summer, while iOS download volume ticked up by just 3%. In South Korea,
Google Play moved ahead of iOS in app revenue generation.
And StatCounter numbers on mobile browser usage seem to be pointing to the
same direction. A year ago, Android phones had 17% mobile browsing market
share in the Philippines vs. iPhone’s 12%. In January 2013 that lead had
grown to 27% vs. 14%. This was the first month when Android took the
browsing share lead from Opera in the Philippines. As feature phones fade,
Android is grabbing their share of mobile page views.
In Brazil, Android’s mobile browser share has vaulted to 38% from 19% in a
year. The iPhone still has a respectable 11% share, which is maybe five
times higher than iPhone’s slice of smartphone shipments in Brazil. But
that outperformance is no longer enough to keep up with the avalanche of
Android phones that are now a prime vehicle for mobile content consumption
for Brazil’s middle classes.
In Germany, Europe’s leading mobile market, Android has just pulled into a
dramatic 51% vs. 31% lead in page views. In Russia, Android has opened a 25%
vs. 18% lead in just the past five months. In affluent Japan, iPhone is
leading Android by just 48% v. 44%.
Apple is still punching way above its unit volume class when it comes to
grabbing consumers who use the smartphone most frequently for content
consumption purposes. But the Google (GOOG)-Samsung strategy of swamping the
market with cheap smartphones is working. Android’s lead in mobile
browsing is growing at an accelerating rate in many major markets. The new
wave of sub-$150 smartphones from Samsung, Huawei and ZTE is shooing
consumers across the globe under Google’s mobile content umbrella. These
consumers will shape the future of mapping, shopping, localized news and
other mobile content industries.
One of these days Apple must choose between the goals of dominating mobile
content and maintaining sky-high phone operating margins. The blended iPhone
ASP of $620 is not compatible with competing against the Android Armada in
Latin America, Africa and Asia, and perhaps not even in Germany or Spain. |
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