China's mobile phone manufacturers are playing an increasingly significant role in global market and the efforts they made began to improve the image of consumer products made in China.
The latest statistics released by market researcher Gartner, Inc. show that China's top three mobile phone vendors, namely Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi, together took up 17.5 percent of global market share in terms of smartphone sales to end users in the third quarter of 2015, following Samsung and Apple, whose market share was 23.7 percent and 13.1 percent, respectively.
Although there is still a large gap in sales between Chinese mobile phone vendors and Samsung and Apple currently, brand visibility of the Chinese firms have increased in both home and global markets over the past few years.
According to statistics released by market research firm GfK, the retail sales of Chinese mobile phone brands dropped 8.7 percent year on year in volume but rose 15.8 percent in value in the first half of this year, showing the sales of China's domestic vendors have been transiting from large quantity to higher quality and they have become in line with, even outperformed, the market development.
Martin Roll, a management consulting firm focusing on business and brand leadership, wrote in Asian Brand Strategy that powerful brands provide unique competitive superiorities for enterprises and help them build differentiated advantages from their counterparts to affect consumers' decision, create consumers' loyalty and improve corporate financial performance.
Chinese vendors have realized the importance of creating successful brands to keep continuous development under intensive market competition, and Huawei, Lenovo, and Xiaomi are among the best mobile phone brands.
Among the top 10 mobile phone vendors by worldwide mobile phone sales to end users in the third quarter of the year, there were five Chinese companies, namely Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi, TCL Communication, and ZTE, whom together took up 19.5 percent of global market share, up 1.4 percentage points from the same period of a year ago.
Chinese manufacturers no longer focus only on manufacturing and selling products as they used to be, but on clearer brand strategy, R&D, innovation, and better user experiences. The mobile phone manufacturers concentrated their brands further to strengthen the competitiveness of their products.
For example, Huawei cut the number of smartphone models to 20 in 2015 from 75 in 2011 with the Mate series featuring high-end business, P series featuring high-fashion, and Honor series featuring high performance with affordable prices.
Huawei and Lenovo were included in the Boston Consulting Group's annual survey of the top 50 most innovative companies across the world and ranked the 45th and the 50th, respectively, this year. Brand value of the Chinese mobile phone vendors have also increased significantly over the past few years.
Huawei was included in the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands for the first time in 2015 as a technology brand with an estimated brand value of 15.335 billion U.S. dollars. In the meantime, Lenovo and ZTE were included in the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Chinese Brands in 2015 with estimated brand value of 3.252 billion dollars and 1.058 billion dollars, respectively.
The leading Chinese manufacturers have moved from low-cost manufacturing to added value, and from regional to multinational. Many of them have become key competitors against western brands in local market, and some of them are turning into key global competitors, according to BrandZ analysis.
Statistics show that two third of Huawei's revenue were from overseas business, and Lenovo's overseas market revenue accounted for 68 percent of its total in fiscal 2014/2015. The "Proposal on Formulating the Thirteenth Five-year Plan (2016-2020) on National Economic and Social Development," which was adopted at the Fifth Session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee ended on Oct. 29, stressed creating new advantages of foreign trade centering technology, criteria, brand, quality and services, and the Chinese mobile phone vendors have already taken one step ahead in building refreshed image for 'made in China'. (Contributed by Luo Jingjing, luojj@xinhua.org)
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