Smartphones have become an essential part of our life since their brilliant debut at the start of this century. There are a number of brands in today’s market: Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, and so on. We can choose a model depending on budgets, designs, and most importantly functions. However, as the number of options increase, they all have become somewhat similar. How can a smartphone, then, gain prominence in this homogeneous market? One of the possible solutions can be “partnership,” as Samsung and Microsoft have announced earlier.
Samsung is a Best-Selling Brand in the Stagnant Market
Samsung’s Galaxy has been a regular best-seller in the global smartphone market for a long time, along with Apple’s iPhone. In the second quarter of 2021, Samsung accounted for 18% of the global smartphone shipments, followed by Xiaomi (16%) and Apple (15%). For the past few years, in fact either Samsung or Apple has led the market with 20-ish % share. In other words, the market is stagnant without any ground-breaking improvements. Looking at the number of smartphones sold to end users worldwide from 2007 to 2021, the stagnation is obvious. Ever since the number peaked in 2018 with 1,556 million smartphones, the sales have been on a gentle downwards slope. Today’s smartphones don’t shine anymore with little improvement in existing features. I mean, who cares if the new smartphone has a slightly better camera resolution?
Strategic Partnership between Samsung and Microsoft to Break Through the Stagnation
Desperately seeking innovation, Samsung took forward its partnership with Microsoft to the next step. Their long-term and strategic partnership aims to deliver seamless productivity experiences across mobile devices. That is to say, customers can enjoy increased and unified services by connecting their Samsung to their Microsoft. Here are some of the services the partnership offers:
- Seamless connection between PC and phone allowing you to control your phone through PC
- Xbox game pass allowing you to play Xbox games on Android devices using an Xbox controller
- Pre-installed Microsoft apps like Office, OneDrive, Outlook on Samsung phones.
Like it or not, we are now surrounded by multiple devices wherever we are, at home, at work or even at school. The service that offers unified flow between them can be the next growth drive for smartphone vendors.
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