The danger is that India is one of their largest markets (44 mil smartphones sales in 2013 up from 16 mil in 2012, 38% market share for Samsung) and the customers may prefer to stay with Android (they are already registering unhappiness with Samsung).
Internal
documents revealed today show how Samsung was looking at not only
itself and Apple but at competition from other Android device makers and
even Google.
– Samsung didn’t
see HTC and other Android device manufacturers as allies. The documents
note HTC’s success at launching on major carriers simultaneously,
providing a consistent look and feel across its range of devices, and
building “carrier friendly, good enough” phones.
– Samsung noted
that its biggest internal problems were a weak brand and low quality. To
emphasize these points, the documents note that carriers were more than
three times as likely to refer customers to an Apple device than to a
Galaxy phone and that there were more than 30 delayed Samsung product
launches in 2011 alone.
– While Samsung’s Galaxy phones rose to
prominence thanks to the Android ecosystem, the company has been
planning for years to ditch the platform for its own operating system as
soon as it can.
That last point could have an incredible impact on
the smartphone market. Samsung sells more devices and makes more profit
than anyone else in the Android space, if any one company could develop a
competitor to Android and iOS, Samsung would be the company with the
resources and sales volume to do it.
So far, Samsung has
only brought its open-source Tizen operating system to prototypes and
smartwatches. It’ll be interesting to see whether the South Korean giant
actually tries to to take on Google in the years to come.
.
The biggest
hurdle the company would need to overcome is app availability: so far,
users seem to be wary of moving to new platforms with more limited
selections of app than what they can get on iOS and Android today.
….
regards