Business Analysis of the UK Smartphone Industry - Case Study Example

The paper 'Business Analysis of the UK Smartphone Industry" is a perfect example of a business case study. It is universally accepted that the Smartphone industry in the UK has witnessed a very extraordinary growth recently with the shipments of this industry rising to approximately 40% in the year 2015 to go above the 1 billion unit threshold (Lin and Ye 2009 617). However, this explosive expansion of this industry has also been accompanied by a number of challenges and disruptions. For instance, the internet or web-based market players are trying very hard to embrace the benefits that mobile offers in the aspects of context, engagement, price and connectivity when compared with their traditional PC-based gateways which have been the driving factors of their business until now (Kenney and Pon 2011 240).

In the UK, Apple iPhone has redefined its business model, Samsung has established a significant advantage most especially because of its ever-expanding scale of its production operations and besides, the barriers to market entry in the UK have reduced tremendously because of the ever-expanding market of Android operating system and the Google company innovation activities like Google Android Phone. All these factors are supported by numerous reference platforms of designs which help propel a thriving manufacturing industry such as the UK smartphone industry. In simple terms, this indicates that the UK smartphone industry is very dynamic and is basically no longer a two-horse race between Samsung and Apple but some other firms like Google, Microsoft and Windows, Palm OS and Blackberry have come into play (Smart 2012 535). Therefore, this research purposes to analyze the external environment using the pestle analysis and the level of competition in the UK smartphone industry using the porter’s five competitive forces and conclude by examining some of the strengths of this industry

2.0 Industry analysis

The smartphone industry in the UK is believed to have taken the world by storm in the year 2007 especially after Apple introduced its first iPhone (Giachetti and Lampel 2010 535). As the feature and basic phones became obsolete, the dynamics of the smartphone industry in the UK changed since new and adventurous market players entered the market to establish the smart mobile devices (BinDhim Freeman and Trevena 2014 43). As of recent, smartphones are one of the dominant products in the global market as they have given room for on-the-go consumption of extensive scales of information and data map than any other products in the UK (Haffey Brady and Maxwell 2013 113).

The total industry size of the smartphone industry is basically 376.7 billion dollars with the total yearly Annual Smartphones shipments in the UK approximately around 1.01 billion and total yearly mobile shipments of 1.83 billion handsets. In the year 2008, Nokia Corporation and Samsung were basically the most dominant leaders in the phone industry in the UK with Nokia primarily controlling approximately 35% of the UK market share (Tilson 2008 57). However, as the industry progressed, the market image and picture has evolved and changed tremendously. In other words, because of the inability of Nokia to evolve with the market dynamics, it is now lagging behind as far as innovation and other market players are concerned. As a result, Apple and Samsung have steadily innovated and risen to the top and are basically the current leaders in the UK smartphone industry (Miller 2012 230). Other firms such as Google, Windows, Huawei technologies, LG and Blackberry are also doing well in the UK smartphone industry. Currently, there is high competition between this firms in the market but the primary competition concentrates between Apple and Samsung but what is surprising is the fact that local firms in the UK like the Google, Huawei, Windows are also taking control, of the international and local market through the provision of user-friendly and low-cost devices hence offering stiff competition to Apple which basically concentrates on high-end users (Rong Shi and Yu 2013 393).