Electronic Commerce Strategies in the Smartphone Industry

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Electronic Commerce Strategies
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Introduction
The advent of technology has facilitated the ubiquitous rise of smartphones. Majority of
the consumers around the world have gone mobile facilitated by the emergence of many
smartphones manufacturers. Notably, some of the global smartphone manufacturers include
Samsung with a market share of 20.5 percent followed by Apple with 14.1 percent. Others are
Huawei with a 10.5 percent market share and Oppo with 7.3 percent. As technology progresses
each marker tries to outshine its competition through new phone designs, better Applications,
connectivity, and marketing strategy.
The recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona saw a number of key
announcements made by major smartphones manufacturers. Connectivity was among the issue
discussed with several devices laying out their progress into the 5G connectivity. In the
Congress, Samsung and Huawei announced the onset of their 5G devices. Samsung has already
started rolling out its 5G as seen in the recent release of the Galaxy S10 5G model (Vecchiato,
2019, pp.123). Additionally, service providers such as Verizon and AT&T are developing
technologies to produce GSM and CDMA cards that will support 5G connectivity. The 5G
network is expected to be 100 times faster than the current 4G/LTE connectivity. 5G will also
provide better gaming experience and deliver data at a whopping 10 gigabytes per second,
compared to the current 1 gigabyte per second.
Device designs have also been a critical area for battling among smartphone companies.
Among the recent headline grabbers in the smartphones is the new foldable smartphones.
Samsung mobile has launched its Galaxy fold and Huawei has made a recent announcement on
its Mate X. however, these phones are at the premium end, retailing at 2,000 US dollars. The past

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smartphone's design has also received significant shift with iPhone pioneering the edge-edge
screen bezel on its iPhone x device. Additionally, Apple in 2017 shifted from its fingerprint
sensor and introduced face recognition technology whereby users have to just look at the phones
to unlock the devices. The battle of devices has been over the years between the two giants that
are iPhone and Samsung. Samsung uses OLED screen technology and Apple relies on the retina
display (Cecere, Corrocher and Battaglia, 2015, pp.170). Additionally. Other notable devices
features include personal assistants such as Siri by Apple, Bixby and Google voice. The
capabilities of a smartphone camera have increasingly become a selling point for smartphone
devices. The era of social media facilitated the advent of camera technologies (Tseng, Liu and
Wu, 2014, pp.52). Oppo has pioneered the smartphone sector with selfie phones with the latest
Oppo f-11 pro having a 40-megapixel camera. Huawei p30 has 3 camera lenses using Leica
technology. These cameras work mutually to improve the quality of the image and prevent frisky
images as a result of shaking.
Apple App store was developed in 2008 and at that time there were only 800 apps for
download. In 2019, there are well over 3,500,000 across both Android and iOS platforms. The
rise of smartphones has facilitated the growth of mobile apps. Some of the apps are for
personalization of device, entertainment such as Netflix, educational, and work-related. Mobile
apps have also facilitated e-commerce (Gikas and Grant, 2013, pp.22). The retail industry has
seen an increase of 200 percent in sale due to mobile apps. Amazon and Walmart are examples
of retailers that are benefiting from e-commerce based applications. In the smartphone industry
there exist two mostly used operating system that is iOS and Android. iOS is used by Apple and
Android by Samsung. Huawei, and Oppo. Android is a third party software provided by Google
(Yeh, Wang and Yieh, 2016, pp.249). Apple applications have a better user interface as both the