As we predicted, Apple is losing ground in the Chinese market.
According to Gartner analyst CK Lu, Apple's slice of China's booming smartphone market slipped for a second straight quarter in October-December.
The problem is that Apple is refusing to change its business model in the highly competitive Chinese market and is losing its ground to cheaper local brands.
Behind the bamboo curtain, Cupertino is facing cut-throat competition from South Korea's Samsung, Nokia, and local firms Huawei and ZTE.
Apple has slipped to a dismal fifth place in China, overtaken by ZTE, and its share of the China smartphone market share slid to 7.5 percent from 10.4 percent in July - September.
Samsung is winning in China, which knocked Nokia from the top spot, taking 24.3 percent of the market, more than three times Apple's share.
Nokia is suffering a bit having lost half of its market share above 40 percent in the first quarter to below one fifth by the fourth quarter.
CZ Lu said that Chinese handset makers have been actively promoting their smartphones with China's three telecoms operators, and ZTE and Huawei gained significant market share.
Gartner expects things to get worse for Apple for at least the next couple of quarters. The company was only able to make a limited impact in this quarter because of the release of the iPhone 4S which just made it to China. The novelty of the new phone is dropping quickly, he noted.
Since the beginning of the year, ZTE had a market share of just three percent, but ended 2011 ranked 4th with over 11 percent market share. It looks like this company is replacing Nokia in the "cheap and cheerful" market while Samsung is killing Apple at the higher end.
Jayesh Easwaramony, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan in Singapore, told Reuters that Apple had ignored the rule of thumb which worked in China. That is that a handset price has to be close to 70 percent of the monthly salary. An iPhone is more than two months which effectively kills it stone dead.
Meanwhile, Huawei and ZTE have the opportunity to cater to a mass market that is captivated by the iPhone, but doesn't have the purchasing power for it.
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When a human lacks the realisation of his true duty, the real reason for his existence, he will automatically step onto the Saviourship-Worship platform whereby an absolutely constructive principle is divided into two diametrically opposing alteregos battling over who owns the principle instead of both behaviours unconditionally complementing in order to realise the principle. Forever and a day because the nature of human behaviour is to engage/take-sides, there being very few who are able to witness without being indifferent, that of being absolutely unconditional.
The Stupid, oka the overly complex because theirs is the universe where knowledge/imagination is used to own the principle of The Living, have fooled almost all into thinking that comfort is real. Comforts like robotics being used to “free” the human from “mundane physical labour”, there being no such thing other than being forced to work like a robot/The Stone Dead in order to survive. Idiotics are so mired in their stupidity [because they were dumb] that they cannot see that all comfort will realise is to turn the comforted into Vegetation & Vegetables, the latter being of immobility. As “astronauts” have found out, the lack of gravity slowly reverts their physique into that of vegetation. Unbeknownst to “scientists” and their inexact science, the physical is one-half of Activity in that it is inversely proportional to intellect as in two parts of hydrogen to one part of oxygen being of the water from which humans are constructed.
When a human relinquishes/diminishes his physical dimension, when there is activity, his intellect will take over the responsibility being physically relinquished. Much to the despair of “Trekkies”, one’s brain will not grow bigger over time in this under-emphasis of the physical favouring over-emphasising the intellect. What will happen is that such a human will merely develop physical ailments relating to underusing what eons of Evolution has provisioned for in order to maintain Balance. Too much intellectual pursuits and indulgences will not only make people obese and T2 diabetic, but it will make them stupid and idiotic.