This year will be tough for Vietnamese mobile firms.

Leading market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) recently gave out a comment Vietnamese brand mobiles could hardly witness breakthroughs in market share expansion in 2012 since foreign players like Nokia, Samsung and LG would continue to lead feature phone market.

“Continuing dominance of big foreign players in low-cost mobile market segment will not only entail difficulties to Vietnamese brand mobile firms but also Chinese brand ones,” said IDC’s senior market analysis expert Vo Thanh.

Director Do Giang Vinh at HiPT Mobile - the owner of Hi-Mobile brand - assumed 2012 would be full of hardships for Vietnamese brand mobiles since too many local firms had jumped into this allegedly lucrative business in 2011.

“The market will experience a reshuffle in the second half of the year and only less than 10 Vietnamese brands could be left alive,” Vinh forecast.

IDC figures showed that there was a slight increase in Vietnamese brand mobile counts in 2011 with sliding market share on the back of tough market competition. Accordingly, Vietnamese brand mobile firms’ total market share shed to 21 per cent in 2011 against 24 per cent in 2010.

Apart from facing a one-sided competition with big foreign names like Samsung, Nokia or LG in low-cost market segment, local mobile firms are also forecast not to create breakthroughs in smart phone segment which could grow over 40 per cent in 2012 thanks to softer prices, according to IDC.

In 2011, some local mobile firms such as Q-Mobile and telecom giant FPT had rolled out smart phone line-ups running on Android management system costing less than VND5 million ($238) one unit.

However, industry insiders assumed this was not a competitive price level compared to what offered by foreign players.

Notwithstanding, 2012 is expected to be an impressive year for military-run telecom group Viettel proposed launching of mobile line-ups entirely made in Vietnam, as most Vietnamese brand mobiles are currently made in China and imported into Vietnam for sale.

Viettel’s terminal equipment manufacturing centre was put online in late 2011 with a designed capacity of five million USBs 3G, or three million handsets, or 900,000 computers per year.

Earlier, Viettel reached a cooperative agreement with Qualcomn in research and manufacture of terminal equipment based on the US-based chipmaker’s technologies and chipsets.

Source: VIR