So the Unthinkable just happened. Xiaomi becomes the number one smartphone company in terms of sales not just in Europe, India or any other particular market but they are now the number one brand worldwide. According to the data released by the Counterpoint research, Xiaomi has overtaken Samsung in the month of June. Xiaomi has a global market share of 17.1 percent in June, with Samsung in second place with 15.7 percent and Apple in third place with 14.3 percent. If we consider the whole Quarter then Samsung is still at the top but the trend is not in favor of the South Korean giant. Now the big question is can Xiaomi sustain this performance or this would be a one-off thing like Huawei? Look I'm not taking away anything from Xiaomi's feat.
This is a monumental achievement especially considering the fact that Samsung has been unstoppable ever since 2012. But one of the biggest reasons Xiaomi was able to do this is because of the supply chain issues Samsung is facing right now. The director of the counterpoint research said that Samsung’s production was disrupted in June due to the market situation in Vietnam, which is where Samsung manufactures and ships a bulk of its phones from. There's a fresh wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam, and as a result, Samsung couldn't produce more phones across all of its channels and thus struggled to meet the demand in the month of June. Additionally, there was a big festival in China in the month of June which saw China’s market grew by 16% MoM and more Chinese people bought Xiaomi phones.
So it will be interesting to see if Xiaomi can sustain this performance in the coming months because the counterpoint expects Samsung to bounce back and regain the number one spot once its supply issues get resolved. So a couple of days ago we saw a report that the Galaxy S21 is performing poorly in sales. The handset is the worst performing S series handset in the history of its existence. There are multiple reasons why this could have happened, could be supply chain issues or the ever-increasing prices, or Samsung reducing the quality of the S series to that of a mid-range handset by offering plastic builds, FHD screens, and taking away features. But the upper management at Samsung is not happy with Samsung mobile and that's why they have conducted a management review of its mobile business this month which will last till August.
Management reviews happen when a company is not happy or if there's a problem with one of their division. In this case, the South Korean media reports that the upper management is not happy with Samsung mobile's lackluster earning, their lower than expected smartphone sales as well as their supply chain issues. Also, Samsung's poor performance when selling 5G phones is another reason for this review. Even though Samsung was the first OEM to commercialize 5G phones, Apple, Oppo, and Vivo now have more 5G market share than Samsung. So expect some hefty changes in tow to improve the efficiency of their mobile division.
Of course, let me know if you were at the upper management at Samsung, what changes would you make to bring the mobile division on track? Let me know in the comments down below and I'll see you tomorrow... Peace out.
Source : TechTalkTV