Dubai: Aggressive retail push from handset manufacturers and new smartphone launches helped the UAE market witness a 41.67 per cent growth in the third quarter.
“The shipments were better than expected and unusually high. Usually, the third quarter of the year is a slow quarter,” said Nabila Popal, research manager for mobile handsets at International Data Corporation (IDC).
Smartphone shipments registering a market share of 76.47 per cent.
In the fourth quarter, the smartphone segment is expected to have 78 per cent market share of the total sales.
Samsung held a market share of 37 per cent in the quarter in the smartphone segment, followed by Apple with 12 per cent and Lenovo with 10 per cent.
With many unbranded phones launching smartphones at one-third of the premium phone prices, these brands have altogether captured six per cent of the market share.
Yes, these low-cost manufactured phones are slowly eating into branded vendors’ market share, Popal said, although most of these brands were launched recently, and some are growing fast. But more than stealing market share, they are capturing more of the real growth in the smartphone market than the big brands are able to.
In the feature (basic) phones segment, Nokia is still the king with about 68 per cent share of the feature phones market in the UAE amid falling dramatically.
“As long as Dubai continues to be a transit city with a large proportion of construction workers, feature phones will remain to be in some demand here. Additionally, phones have become the highest trading commodity. Dubai is not just a transit city for people, but also for phones — that are re-exported to other countries from here,” she said.
So, she said that as long as there is demand for feature phones in Africa, they will always be traded and routed through Dubai. IDC statistics does account the re-exports.
D.Y. Kim, President of LG Gulf, said that it has been a good year for LG with G2 and G3 models and our strategy is to focus more on G series smartphones.
“We are bringing new models on our affordable L series, which will be our volume mover. We are expecting 50 per cent year-on-year growth in mobile phone segment,” he said.
LG had a market share of seven per cent.
Despite a very good string of various efforts by Nokia and BlackBerry, such as launch of BlackBerry Passport and rebranding of Nokia smartphones to Microsoft, the companies were not able to capture much growth.
“This is especially critical in a market that is growing. However, I don’t think it’s time to write off BlackBerry just yet as many analysts are eager to do, as I think BlackBerry has secured for itself — although small — a niche market of corporate high end users,” Popal said.
