Apple and its followers in China

Apple topples market estimates. So does its followers in China.

In China, MP3 industry has always been in a mess. Since the launch of first iPod, MP3 became popular in China, too. Hundreds of factories started to produce MP3. After all these years, iPod is becoming more and more popular, but the China MP3 industry is still full of small factories, no big brand. Among them, now, there are two manufacturers are doing good jobs. They are Meizu and Oppo.

Especially Meizu, follows Apple very close. At the beginning, Meizu copied iPod appearance, at the same time, only 1/3 or half of the price of iPod. But now, Meizu is still following Apple, though, is doing a better and better job. The quality is better, the launch time is shorter, and now they began to add some more human oriented functions, which is better than iPod! At the same time, the price is still half of the price of Apple.

When I found there is almost only Apple iPod as the MP3 player in US, I was astonished. It is unbelievable. In the biggest market, there is only one brand in the market. Yes, iPod is good, but I like to have more choices. In China, there are dozens of brands in the market, with different prices and choices!

I hope the followers in China will sometime equal Apple.

Media Tek Buys ADI

iPhone sold 1 million within 6 days, it is a business miracle in the world. But there is another miracle maker in China in the mobile phone industry. That is Media Tech.

Media Tek Inc was founded in 1997, and it started to sell the cell phone chips to mainland China from 2004. Now, Media Tek covers the largest market share of cell phone chips in mainland China: 40%.

The Chinese maker of cell phone started to boom from 2002, and fell down in 2004. The reason is complicated, but one of the reasons is lack of technology support, especially the chips. Media Tek came in the right time. With Media Tek’s chips, the cell phone maker could launch a new model within very short time and low technology. So the Chinese cell phone maker began to recover with the help of Media Tek. Until now, only one Chinese cell phone maker doesn’t buy chips from Media Tek.

But there is a side effect. Since Media Tek made the cell phone development so easy, a lot of manufacturers began to make cell phone with the government’s certificate. They are called “black cell phone” in China. Now, a cell phone with windows CE, camera and GPS is sold about 200 US Dollars in China!!

It was just released that Media Tek bought Othello and Softfone from ADI, and got all the main technology of TD-SCDMA. What will happen in the 3G time? Media Tek no doubt will be an important player.

Digital Camera

It is a pity that there is no mainland company has the CCD technology of digital camera. The factories which produce the digital camera in mainland are invested by only Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese. So the mainland manufacturers do not export digital camera. This is rare.

Almost all the famous brands, like Canon, Sony, Pantax, Panasonic, Olympus, Casio, Fuji, and Samsung, have factories in mainland China. But there is some Taiwan manufacturers, too. They are Premier and Mento Media.