We are pleased to bring you our Monthly Market Pulse. In this edition we provide our snap analysis of some of the key product launches from MWC.
This report will almost coincide with Samsung’s Galaxy S8 launch, which is a tremendously important product for the company – doubly so in many respects following the disruptive Note 7 withdrawal. We have analysts at the event and will bring you our reaction and thoughts on the product.
Our key takeaways after Market analysis in February 2017 :
- February is a tough month. It’s short contains Lunar New Year and, in the Northern hemisphere at least, has grim weather that keeps shoppers home in the warm. Add to this the fact that many key product launches occur in the months that immediately follow and it’s no wonder that sales are pretty muted. In this environment we should treat market shifts with some care as they are likely not fully indicative of longer term trends. March will likely see a snap to sequential growth.
- The run of the Chinese duo of Oppo and Vivo still looks good on a year over year basis, despite February’s softness. However the pair will likely face a sterner test to maintain growth in 2017. The year over year comparisons will get much harder and they’re running out of runway in many of the markets they’ve done well in so far. We think they’ll find 2017 much tougher to make headway in.
- Sell-in dropped compared to January as inventory corrections continued and some Chinese vendors reduced orders due to slow growth in demand. We think most of the excess inventory should have been cleared, opening the way for an uptick in both sell-in and sell-through in March.
- MWC has come and gone for another year. New visitor records were set again with the event diversifying; 5G was inevitably widely discussed with IoT being a key use case under discussion. Operators continue to claim that the business case for 5G will be difficult to make though. Among a number of high profile product launches at the show we highlight, HMD (Nokia), the LG G6 and the Huawei P10/P10 Plus.
The full report and accompanying excel files are available to Market Pulse customers. If you’re interested in joining the growing ranks of Counterpoint’s customers, please feel free to reach out to us at info@counterpointresearch.com
If you have any other questions please feel to use the same address.
