The Rising Smartphone Threat of China

various chinese mobile copycat products

On 13th,Nov. chinese mobile phone vendor "No.1" released new smartphone following and copying the design of Xiaomi.

Meaning that Xiaomi,this Beijing-based company is now one of most influential brand in china.

This company has come out of nowhere this year to become the biggest threat to Apple, Samsung and other smartphone makers.

Ironically Xiaomi is company that grew by copying most of apple products itself.

Founded by a group of Chinese engineers in 2009, Xiaomi sold seven million mobile phones in 2012 by using designs that, according to the New York Times "mimic the look and feel of the iPhone and using marketing that seems right out of Apple’s playbook."

Xiaomi is now the sixth biggest smartphone vendor in China, ranking above Apple. Chinese consumers bought 88.1 million smartphones (33 percent of all worldwide shipments) in the three months to June 2013. Xiaomi owns about 5 percent of this market with Apple just behind on 4 percent.

Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi,ZTE,Huawei and Goophone are becoming new disruptive force that particularly stands out to other smartphonemakers such as Apple and Samsung as a potential game-changer.

The company behind the original “Goophone,” a Chinese iPhone 5 knockoff powered by Android, has beaten Apple (AAPL) to the punch by launching an updated “i5S” version of its smartphone. The handset uses a design that is nearly identical to Apple’s iPhone 5 and it runs a highly customized version of Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean that has been modified to look and act like iOS. The handset features a 4-inch “oneglass” screen with 854 x 480-pixel resolution, a 1GHz dual-core MediaTek processor, 512MB of RAM and a 5-megapixel camera, and it costs just $150 in China.

Chinese brands are now substantial in their own markets, dominant in some cases. The world stage beckons. Apple and Samsung will need to be more nimble to deal with them.