To review the year of 2012, we can see that both mobile phone products and mobile phone markets changed a lot. The configuration of smart phones developed much while the price dumped into thousand RMB. A year ago, the situation was beyond imagination.
In China’s mobile phone market, Samsung has got champion by proper control of chain of downstream industries and excellent performance of GALAXY. Xiaomi produced high-configured smart phone with low price and was followed by crowds of domestic mobile phone manufacturers to imitate. Generally speaking, China’s phone market in 2012 was wonderful and hopeful. Now, let’s make some guesses for the 2013 China’s mobile phone market.
Guess 1: Microsoft acquires Nokia?
In early 2011, the software giant Microsoft reached an agreement with veteran mobile phone maker Nokia, developing Windows Phone system in order to compete with their rivals: Apple and Google. Why will Microsoft acquire Nokia?
(Nokia and Microsoft announced joint)
First of all, the Internet industry has entered the era that the biggest three, Apple, Google and Microsoft have penetrated into various fields. In the crucial field of mobile Internet, Apple has its own smart phone brand iPhone and iOS operating system, while Google only owned the Android operating system before. Google has acquired Motorola Mobility to spread its mobile career and in this way, Google will be able to achieve control of the operating platform for mobile software and mobile phone software operating system. The purpose of the policy shift is obvious that Google wants to achieve greater control over the user experience, and the best way is to control the software and hardware products.
(Google announced the acquisition of Motorola)
With Google’s supplement and improvement of the hardware platform, Microsoft is in an embarrassing situation that it becomes the one who only has mobile phone software, but not the operating system. From the institutional perspective, Microsoft is faced with tremendous pressure and the only way to compete with another two is to take the same approach: to control mobile phones which run its software products, thus to ensure the perfect user experience and to continue the game with Apple and Google.
Secondly, Nokia is essentially an industrial manufacturing company, whose success is attributed to its rigorous focus on good products. Nevertheless, since iPhone launched, the connotation of mobile phone manufacturing has been changed. The speed of smart phone to change mobile Internet ecosystem is far beyond Nokia’s imagination. That leads to the situation that in the era of smart phones, Nokia has lagged far behind its competitors. In December 2012, Nokia has just announced the sale of its headquarters building in Espoo, Finland, at price of 170 million Euros. According to foreign media data, Nokia has six consecutive quarter losses by the third quarter of 2012. All of these indicated that Nokia is in dilemma.
There is no doubt that Nokia is the best acquisition target of Microsoft for the above two reasons. Despite poor performance, Nokia is still one of the world's top three mobile phone manufacturers, with the world's top manufacturing strength and large business telecommunications equipments, which accounted for 30% of the company's total revenue. In addition, Nokia also has a large amount of cash, with net cash of more than 6 billion U.S. dollars. More importantly, Nokia's current market value is not that high and will not bring too much pressure on Microsoft's cash flow even if it pays acquisition in cash.
(Microsoft acquires Nokia?)
Guess 2: Apple cooperates with China Mobile?
It seems that Apple has become the target of public criticism of a number of industries since iPhone was born. However, the company lost Steve Jobs does not operate so smoothly in the nearest two years. To keep staying ahead, Apple is likely to make some unusual action in 2013.
Different form Jobs, who has strong personal idealism, current Apple CEO Cook is purely a businessman. From the launch of the iPad mini, it is not difficult to see Cook’s pursuit of interests. To make Apple’s earnings more beautiful, Apple might make a breakthrough in 2013.
Guess 3: Apple enters the TV industry?
As just mentioned above, Apple’s operation is no longer so smoothly and it is related to the decline in competitiveness of the iPhone. On one hand, iPhone 5 is lack of innovation; on the other hand, the pressure from the Samsung GALAXY series phone cannot be ignored.
There are more and more signs indicate that Apple is transferring its focus to another area - the smart TV.
(Apple enters into the field of television?)
Actually, when Steve Jobs just passed away, some foreign media discloses that his wish is Apple iTV after iPad. Cook said in an interview with NBC television, Apple currently is extremely focused on redefining the TV, and he has a very large plan for the next generation Apple TV product. "Whenever I go to the living room, turn on the TV, I suddenly feel like going back twenty or thirty years ago. We do have a strong interest in TV field, but temporarily it is inconvenient to say too much. "
(Cook said Apple's ongoing TV product development)
So, Apple is likely to launch Apple TV together with new iPhone or iPad products in 2013.
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