2015 Trends

FancyFon: Bartosz Leoszewski's 2015 Trends

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Category: 2015 Trends
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Stop thinking about smartphone market as the battle between Apple and Samsung. It was never true for emerging markets.

This year it’s time to turn the spotlight on custom smartphone vendors with their own versions of Android OS, especially Asian producers. The previous year has already brought an unexpected growth and changes among leading global manufacturers. In 2014, the Chinese tech startup Xiaomi experienced 227% growth in handset shipments and 135% growth in revenue. According to the leading research reports, the Chinese vendors will reach 15% or more of worldwide market share. And the piece of the pie in emerging markets (APAC and Central-Eastern Europe) for companies such as Xiaomi, One Plus and Huawei will be even bigger. Of course, Chinese smartphone providers are leading the custom Android devices pack but smaller vendors are also gaining popularity (ever heard of BQ, Prestigio?).

Why are custom Android manufacturers becoming more and more popular? The main reason is the price. Cheap Android smartphones are affordable and offer quite good hardware configuration. These manufacturers are often more flexible when it comes to device customization and flexibility. With more and more companies in need of locked down devices or single-use devices, it’s often easier to order a personalized device from white-label producer and modify it at a hardware and software level. These factors make custom Android devices highly competitive in comparison with tech-giants like Apple and Samsung.

Sounds incredible? Probably yes, but if you take a look at the telecom industry, you can see that the market is becoming highly saturated and can no longer compete on price alone. What we’re observing is mobile operators and service providers competing in additional business services (e.g. outsourcing Enterprise Mobility Management) and differentiating their offering based on that. Incorporating custom Android devices to operators’ offer allows small and medium enterprises to reduce costs of deployment and use it to better meet their needs.

Incorporating smartphones and tablets, in all different formats, with all different kinds of operating systems, makes it necessary for companies to deploy solutions that centralize managing and securing mobile workforce. This needs to be done with a focus on mobile workers expectations (including privacy and usage monitoring) but also taking into account company’s interests regarding data protection and expense monitoring. The key issue is to establish a transparent and coherent privacy policy for end users and provide solution for IT pros to remotely manage corporate and private devices.

In 2014, experts often highlighted the costs of unsecure handheld devices in a workplace. It is worth noting that data breaches are connected not only with financial loss but also have a non-financial consequences (such as reputation damage or brand value risk). In our opinion, 2015 will be the year of opportunities provided by well-tailored enterprise mobility management platforms. We strongly believe this year will be extremely exciting. Our team will keep an eye on the emerging markets and develop our flagship product to reflect the observed trends and customer needs.

 

Bartosz Leoszewski is the CEO of FancyFon Sotware.

 



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