(image taken from this site)
According to the article by Chuck Jones, Apple’s share of the smartphone market in differently countries around the world has simultaneously fallen over the past three years. In this post, I will try to analyse the internal and external factors which cause this decreasing share.
- Internal
Despite the continuous release of new products, Apple’s product features recently didn’t seem to satisfy the customers’ expectation as they used to. In another word, lack of unprecedented innovation deprived iPhone’s attractiveness to the customers. Furthermore, the reports of bent iPhone6 also worried the potential customers. To make things worse, iPhone 6 will not be available in China where a lot of “iFans” anticipated for a long time until October 17th. Nevertheless the hunger marketing strategy had been well received in China over the past years, the late release in China will definitely disappoint the customers in China and prevent some of them from waiting for it.
- External
Undoubtedly, the increasing competitiveness of the Android rivals like Samsung and Huawei have inevitably threatened market share of iPhone. With more reasonable prices and guaranteed quality, iPhone is no longer the only and the best choice to the smartphone customers.
- Recommendation
Considering the positioning of a leader, I recommend Apple to embrace the changes in the market. To obtain more share in the Asian market, they should do more researches about the different customer segments in Asia to figure out their requests such as reasonable prices and customized functions, rather than “just increasing the screen sizes and changing the colours.”
In conclusion, Apple should make more efforts to reverse its market share losses in not only China and Japan but countries all over the world.