Slips to number world number four as ships 11.5 million smartphones in second quarter
Chinese phone manufacturer, ZTE, has increased its global smartphone shipments yet still managed to slip to fourth place in the marketshare leader's table.
ZTE nearly doubled its smartphone shipments year on year, from 5.8 million in the second quarter 2012 to 11.5 million in the same quarter 2013, a year on year increase of 79%, according to data from research company Strategy Analytics.
Yet last year ZTE shared joint third place with LG, whereas this year LG pipped ZTE to the third spot with shipments of 12.2 million for the quarter.
ZTE now holds 5% of the smartphone marketshare. LG has 5.3% in second place, Apple has 13.6% with 31.2 million units shipped up from 26 million one year ago, and at number one is Samsung with 33.1%, or 76 million smartphone shipments in the quarter, up from 48.7 million one year ago, said Strategy Analytics.
The sales performance that made ZTE the highest placed Chinese smartphone manufacturer will be enhanced by a product development focus on three key segments: 4G; high end devices; and phones based on newer platforms such as Intel chipsets and the Firefox operating system.
To fuel ZTE's development of high performance products, the company plans to unveil its self developed chipset to power 4G devices at the Expo Comm China 2013 conference in Beijing in September. The chipset will be the first in the industry to attain 4G standards in communications and data throughput, the company claimed.
Through the company's collaboration with Intel and Firefox, ZTE is well positioned to take advantage of the growth in the non-Android segment of the global smartphone market. In July, ZTE and Intel jointly launched the GEEK smartphone, powered by Intel's 2.0GHz dual-core Atom processor Z2580, with Intel's hyper-threading technology and Turbo Boost feature providing superior multitasking performance and power efficiency. The GEEK smartphone further strengthened ZTE's partnership with Intel, after the two companies collaborated to offer the Grand X IN smartphone in 2012.
This year, ZTE and Firefox collaborated to offer the ZTE Open, featuring open web technology and support for HTML 5 applications in a new operating platform. As the first Firefox phone, and featuring ZTE's intelligent offline search technology, ZTE Open has first-mover advantage and generated positive user reviews from customers.
