Why Samsung doesn't sell phones in China

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►►► About this video ◄◄◄

Samsung's market share in China is just 0.6%. The world's largest smartphone maker no longer manufactures phones in the country either. What went wrong?

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►►► TechAltar links ◄◄◄

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►►► Attributions ◄◄◄

[TechAltar]

Some corrections:
- The graph around 2:11has an axis showing 0, 0, 0, 0. It looks like we accidentally chopped off the first digits. These are supposed to be 0, 10, 20, 30.
- Yes, Japan is missing from our map. Not sure how we did that, haha.

[framboosmatroos]

So glad you remembered the password for your main channel

[camoensdecervantes]

In Brazil, we used to call Samsung from Sanguessuga (leech), because of the high prices and the bad quality of the products it offers in our market.

[WanneSomeSoup]

I went to the US for my college a few years ago. Before I left, Samsung was a popular brand and my mom was also using one of the Galaxy phones. When I came back to China, I was going to buy a new Samsung to replace my old Huawei, because those ads I saw in the US were actually pretty cool. And my old friends were all like "Samsung? Who still uses Samsung nowadays?" I was only away for two years.

[davidmin]

When you price your product at double the price of a competitors with roughly equivalent hardware, in a category that's becoming commodified, what do you expect? Brand value only goes so far

[hugh]

I'm a smartphone enthusiast in China, I think I have some supplement about Samsung's fail in China.
At first, I prefer a Samsung flagship (especially note series) more than Huawei or Xiaomi. I have a high requirement about screen, I like the boxy design of note series and note's big screen (as large as 6.0 inchs in 16:9 ratio), also, samsung's oneui provides massive customizing option, that allows me to make the system looks the way i want and improved interaction effeciency.

However, just little people is enthusiast, most customers don't need such a good screen, on the contrary, the strobe produced by pwm dimming of samsang can not be avoid if user don't know to use a 3rd part program. by now, built in DC dimming option is popular in all chinese domestic smartphones with OLED screen which indeedly makes user more comfortable.

Also. in recent years. charging speed and enduranceis another important point about smartphone, you know China is a country in fast develope, most people are busy, a fast charging speed and long endurance is crucial. even 60W of is just average for a chinese flagship smartphone. and chinese smartphones are highly optimized for chinese application ecology.However, samsung poorly done for both in China while iphone is good in endurance at least with the advantage of IOS.

the last reason is not about smartphone, but may be the most important. It is sales outlets. most Chinese buy smartphones in physical store. they buy smartphone from nearest store. This is the flaw of samsung, even a large city in China may have only 3 samsung smartphone stores(The example is Changsha where i live). meanswhile. huawei oppo vivo store can be found almost every block in city and even in villages. there is no reason for non-samsung fans to go so far to buy a samsung phone when they don't know what's samsung's advantage.

Actually, I think there is still room for samsung to live well in Chinse market. China has never officially banned samsung smartphone(except galaxy note7). there is still enough potential samsung user in China, samsung smartphone is still a popular topic on the internet, many people want to have a try of samsung for the good design and screen(just like me), but finally didn't because of other disavantages. I believe, if samsung makes its phone better in charging speed, battery endurance and make the UI more fit to China. many people won't refuse to buy a samsung smartphone.

As a Chinese, I hope all chinese domestic brand become better and better, And as well, I hope samsung make better smartphones and keep alive in China, whatever, more competition and more choices are always better for us cunsumers

First time try commenting in English on youtube(forgive my poor English😆)

[mukamuka]

I remember quite well, back then in 2013. Samsung J series and other of their mid range model is cost 50% more but spec 50% less. They get away with it because back then other competitors is quite weak.

[ameyab]

I think they are also happy selling components to the Big 5 rather than fighting with them.

[sorenkair]

Holy shit Apple has almost 70% market share in Japan.

[ghunterforever]

you are missing the important part about the Note 7 instance, when it first caught fire in China, Samsung's PR jumped the gun and blamed the consumer for putting their Note 7 in microwave oven in hope to get refund. THAT was the beginning of the end for Samsung smart phone.

the official statement was made by Samsung China on September 19th 2016, stating (i am translating here) the lab research shown the note 7 that caught fire was due to external heat source.

the problem is that what you read on the English site rarely covers the entire picture (and that goes WAY beyond just note 7), you won't find anything about that statement in a English site, but if you were able to read some none English sources, it was quite obvious.

the rest of it was history, eventually Samsung acknowledged the flaw in the battery manufacture process and issued recall in China. BUT, to this very day, Samsung has not issued apology or retrieve the statement blaming customers for putting phones in microwave oven to set it on fire.

[Arkan_Fadhila]

ouhh that's a quite hard lesson for samsung indeed. Glad they learn from their mistakes and compete stronger than ever in other areas.

[ria]

4:18 that map doesn't have japan in it, the label is placed on the phillipines

[DriantX]

2:42 "A faster and complete collapse from market leader to basically irrelevance is hard to imagine"

Nokia: I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that

[bilalmustafa]

I love this way to distribute 3 marketing strategies into 3 layers then explain individually. Eventually, this way is so easy to understand.

[chengjung]

In my opinion, the reason is basically same as the pc/laptop industry. I still can recall Toshiba dominated the laptop sales in the US dues to its superior craftsmanship and technology. I didn't last long until the US local tech giants like HP, Compaq and then Dell started to take over the laptop market shares. And finally when the profit wasn't enough for Toshiba to continue its business, it first quitted gave up some of its oversea laptop markets and eventually fully quitted the whole laptop business last year.
As a summary, when the smartphone market is becoming saturated, and the technology starts to reach some of its bottleneck, it will be getting tougher for those smartphone giants to keep their sale numbers.

[redhongkong]

I still remember how samsung failed. I dont know which year. If u mentioned 2013 i guess thats the year. Their new phone 's battery overheat and exploded. They recall phones everywhere in the world and apologize to customers. But never did a recall or show any apology to chinese market. And thats when chinese "exploded" and everyone start boycott samsung phones. That lowered all local shop income. They closed shop and service s point and butterfly effect rendered less and less customer.

[sidharthgkumar]

Title: Why samsung phones failed in China

Me: wait what?..Did they?..

[rae]

I remember using SAMSUNG about a decade ago, in fact, everyone in the family had one back then. What put me off was the key-in format. For a very long time, I just simply couldn't figure out the logic behind it, how to switch between numbers, Chinese characters, English letters, apostrophes... finally gave up, and got a HTC, then Nokia windows phone, finally APPLE.

[basiljacab]

As a former Samsung Galaxy phone user in China, yes sumsung mobile phones are as expensive as iphone with the best hardware quality. But Sumsung didn't do much localized software maintenance in China. You see, Chinese app environment is quite different from the the outside world. Most Samsung Galaxy series user(including me and some of my friends) get crazy when our phone get much slower the next year and then we switch to iphone(2013～2017).Meanwhile, the the local Chinese phone maker update the software system very frequently to offer good experience even though their products are at a much afford price. And there are some other problems, but the company didn't react quick enough to these problems. So Samsung mobile phone slowly lost their position and disappeared in China...

[彭凯斯]

As a normal Chinese consumer, owning a Samsung was considered a luxury in the past. However, nowadays, in the high-end smartphone market, it is beaten by Apple and Huawei. In the low-end market, it is surpassed by other Chinese smartphone brands.