Something is definitely happening on the mobile phone market. Soon the veterans and also market leaders, Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson could see strong competition coming from what are more or less newcomers to the business. A few examples in this regard? The Matsushita giant, the owner of the Panasonic brand, will launch no less than six new mobile phones in Romania this autumn, after a period during which it went for a wait-and-see approach.
The Chinese manufacturer ZTE, which had been absent from this market thus far, is getting ready to tempt Romanians with a set of mobile phones at competitive prices, and with a particularly fashion-oriented positioning.
The Israel-based company Emblaze, another new entry, launched a smartphone priced at about 400 euros in Romania just a few days ago, a phone that has a built in video camera and is compatible with third generation (3G) mobile telephony.
All these mobile phone manufacturers seem encouraged by the success of HAT, a dealer of Samsung handsets, which has managed to push the market share of the latter company from zero to several percentage points.
"The HAT Group Romania has managed to bring the Samsung brand to one of the top positions among customer choices in just one year from its launch. Samsung aims to become the leading player on the market for camera phones in Romania. Its portfolio should comprise no less than 14-16 models by the end of the year, most of which will include a built-in camera," marketing manager Doru Oraselu told Ziarul Financiar.
The sales manager of Emblaze's Romanian branch, Eran Kerem, feels Romanians are looking for phones with increasing numbers of features, because having such a phone is a matter of status in Romania.
"Furthermore, our surveys show that the future of mobile telephony belongs to the so-called smartphones that can combine the functionality of a phone with those of a video camera; of an mp3 player or of a photo camera; that can exchange data with their peers; and so on," says Kerem. These smartphones come with a hefty price tag, though. Do they have a future in Romania? Kerem feels they do.
"Romania is a poor country as far as statistics are concerned, but it has clubs that match those in New York, which are simply packed every weekend; mountain and seaside resorts are fully booked during the season despite their much higher prices compared with the resorts abroad, not to mention the cars and technologies you can see in Romania," he argued.
Panasonic, which was a known brand when GSM mobile telephony was first launched in Romania, preferred only to import mobile terminals when there was demand for them. "Things will change as of this month, when we introduce six new models on the Romanian market," explained Stefan Ichim, Panasonic's business systems sales manager.
The mobile phone market, which amounted to 172 million euros according to the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO), witnessed a slowdown in growth as of 2002 (9.9%) to 6.4% last year and should progress by the reduced rate of 4.6% this year.
victor@zf.ro
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