Brand Royalty
It was found that in the shopping season of December in the US, that brand loyalty to Samsung Electronics was greater than last year, attracting a lot of attention. In general, sales of Apple products in the smartphone market are high in the US holiday shopping season in December, but sales of Samsung Electronics products edged up compared to last year despite the Galaxy Note 7 incident.
According to Flurry, a market researcher, Apple's iPhones and iPads sold in the US Christmas shopping season from December 19 to 25 (local time) accounted for 44% of the total, getting the lion’s share. Samsung Electronics chalked up 21%. Huawei and LG Electronics came in third and fourth, respectively. Analysis say that Huawei and LG Electronics could not place their individual models on the top 35 model list but they could rank high because they offered a wide array of products to choose from because they have diverse product lineups.
What is noteworthy is that Samsung's sales during the Christmas shopping season were still only about the half of Apple's but Samsung did not lose its market share despite the discontinuance of sales and production of the Galaxy Note 7. This is because the proportion of Samsung products sold during the shopping season jumped 1%p from last year.
"Consumers who wanted to buy the Galaxy Note 7 chose Samsung's other flagship smartphones," said Steven Baker, an analyst at NPD Group's Hardware (HW) specialist. "This enabled Samsung Electronics to survive competition with other rivals of the Android group and Apple. On top of that, the iPhone 7 released in 2016 was not as good as expected," he said.
According to market researcher Gartner, sales of smartphones in the global market fell 14.2% year on year in the third quarter of last year. Apple's iPhone sales continue to decline, with the 4th-quarter results of fiscal year 2016 falling for the first time in 15 years. However, thanks to the launches of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, Apple’s earnings are expected to recover in the first quarter of 2017.