Strategy and Innovation in Mobile Phone Sector

The assignment analyzes the strategy and innovation of leading mobile phone companies over the past ten years. It highlights the use of blue ocean strategy, emergent phase innovation strategies, and rapid growth phase strategies by companies such as Apple, Samsung, and Huawei. The document concludes that these companies have used different innovation strategies to achieve success in the highly competitive mobile phone sector.

Running head: MOBILE PHONE SECTOR STRATEGY AND INNOVATION 1
Strategy and Innovation – Top Mobile Phone Companies
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MOBILE PHONE SECTOR STRATEGY AND INNOVATION 2
Strategy and Innovation – Top Mobile Phone Companies
Mobile phone services have caused a revolution in the world and have led to a myriad of
transformations. Some of the major competitors in the mobile phone sector are Apple, Samsung
and Huawei (Xie & Liang 2013, pp.121). Apple is a company that is top of the list and its
growth strategies have enabled it to be very successful (West & Mace 2007, pp.18). The
company has broadly differentiated its products hence making them stand out in a highly
competitive market. Apple is an example of a mobile phone company that has used the blue
ocean strategy (Kim & Mauborgne 2004, pp.71). The company looked at untapped market space
and created a unique product in form of the iPhone and iPad (West & Mace 2007, pp.19).
Through this, they came up with an elegant phone design that was very friendly to the user and
had high-end branding. Apple also used emergent strategies to launch the iPhone and iPad (Pitt
& Koufopoulos 2012, pp.306). Over the past ten years, the company has been able to
successfully launch different iPhone models that have succeeded.
Samsung is another mobile company that has managed to succeed in the industry.
Samsung is a company that has been around for a long time (Xie & Liang 2013, pp.123). Over
the years, the company has developed into one which has acquired a big market share in the
global mobile sector. The company can be said to have widely benefited from rapid growth
phase strategies and innovation-intensive strategies (Pitt & Koufopoulos 2012, pp. 334).
Samsung grew very rapidly since it invented mobile phones that covered both high and low ends
of the market. This led to a growth spurt that saw the company rise rapidly over the last 10 years.
Innovation-intensive strategies were used when the competition had become quite intense (Xie &
Liang 2013, pp.124). This saw the company launching the Samsung ‘S’ series which were

MOBILE PHONE SECTOR STRATEGY AND INNOVATION 3
launched as a response to the iPhone launch by Apple. The Samsung ‘S’ series were very
successful apart from one time that some S 7 phones had to be recalled due to battery faults.
Huawei is also a very successful company in the mobile sector. The company mostly
serves high and middle-end markets (Nakai & Tanaka 2010, pp. 4). The company invests a lot in
research and development. It has used emergent phase innovation strategies and rapid growth
phase strategies (Pitt & Koufopoulos 2012, pp.315). The launch of its mobile phones required
emergent phase strategies that enabled it to penetrate different markets. Once this had happened,
the company applied rapid growth phase strategies which saw the company sell 108 million
phones in 2015 making the company rank third all over the world. Huawei has grown so rapidly
over the past ten years that it is considered the most successful Chinese brand.
The conclusions about the above companies have been reached by analysing the company
trends for the past 10 years. The type of innovation that the companies have used has been
determined based on the products that they have been coming up with and their target market.
The conclusions are appropriate since different innovation strategies are used for different types
of products and markets.

MOBILE PHONE SECTOR STRATEGY AND INNOVATION 4
References
Kim, W.C. and Mauborgne, R., 2004. Blue ocean strategy. If you read nothing else on strategy,
read these best-selling articles. p.71.
Nakai, Y. and Tanaka, Y., 2010, July. Chinese company's IPR strategy: How Huawei
Technologies succeeded in dominating overseas market by Sideward-Crawl Crab Strategy.
In Technology Management for Global Economic Growth (PICMET), 2010 Proceedings of
PICMET'10: (pp. 1-5). IEEE.
Pitt, M.R. and Koufopoulos, D., 2012. Essentials of strategic management. Sage.
West, J. and Mace, M., 2007, February. Entering a mature industry through innovation: Apple's
iPhone strategy. In DRUID Summer Conference (pp. 18-20).
Xie, W. and Liang, H., 2013, July. A case study: Innovation strategy assessment of the leading
smartphone companies. In Innovation Conference (SIIC), 2013 Suzhou-Silicon Valley-Beijing
International (pp. 121-126). IEEE.