14 DAY TRIAL // The average selling price of smartphones seems to be declining fast, as mobile-phone makers are trying to increase their market share, and are pushing cheaper and cheaper handsets to shelves. One such example would be a Symbian smartphone that should feature a price tag of only €100, and that is expected to arrive on the market as soon as this year, according to Lee Williams, head of the Symbian Foundation.
“This year we will see a few products hitting that point,” he has said in a recent interview with Reuters at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The price tag won't be too much lower than the cheapest Symbian devices from Nokia today, which are available on the market for as low as €120-€130, but the move will represent a turning point for the industry, it seems.
According to Reuters, the cheap smartphones will also be helped on their way to shelves by chipset makers like Qualcomm and Infineon, as they are expected to lower production costs through the manufacturing scale and technical innovation. In addition, the news site also states that the price tags for smartphones will drop fast due to an increasing competition among handset vendors around the world.
“Operators are crying out for lower cost smartphones to reduce their subsidy burden and to seed the mass-market with more advanced data devices,” analyst Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics states, according to the news site. “Lower-cost smartphones will drive up vendors' shipments, but they will simultaneously push down average selling prices and profit margins,” he also notes. The Symbian platform has all the chances to dominate the entry-level smartphone market, both due to its inclusion in Nokia's roadmap, and courtesy of its large presence on emerging markets around the world, it seems. At the same time, it will also see an increased competitiveness in the area, as Samsung already announced plans to push devices powered by its new bada OS to emerging markets. The main idea is that all these will result in the lowering of the price tags that smartphones will see on the market, it seems.