OPPO Electronics Corp. recently launched three smartphones in the Philippines as International Data Corp. (IDC) said it forecast Chinese vendors focusing on increasing their presence in more Southeast Asia countries this year.
“To successfully combat local players overseas, Chinese vendors will need to focus on channel relationships and localized marketing strategies,” Tay Xiaohan, senior market analyst with IDC Asia/Pacific’s client devices team, was quoted in a statement as saying.
“Most of the market’s growth will come from sub-$150 phones as feature phone users switch to low-cost smartphones,” Xiaohan added.
That growth curve is what the Chinese manufacturer appears to meet with one of the three smartphones it launched, called Joy Plus, priced at roughly $112 (P4,990).
The model has a 4-inch display, 1.3 gigahertz (GHz) processor, Version 2.0 Color operating system (OS, which is based on Android 4.4), 4 gigabytes (GB) of storage and a 3-megapixel (MP) camera.
One of the smartphones called Neo 5 is priced midrange at P7,990 ($179.27). It features a 4.50-inch display, 1.3GHz Quad-core processor and Color OS 2.0, 8 GB storage, 4th generation long-term evolution (4G LTE) Internet connectivity, 8-MP rear and 2-MP front cameras and 1G B of random access memory.
The third phone launched called R1x is priced at roughly $359. It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 Octa-core processor, a 13-MP camera, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage and supports up to 128 GB of additional storage. “These three phones, each of their own category, can stand out. They have qualities users can’t experience in other phones,” Garrick Hung, Philippine OPPO Mobile Technology Inc. operations manager, said.
Hung added that the Dongguan, Guangdong province, China- based company would launch new products around June or July. Oppo is bundled with the other brands that compose 41.7 percent of the total smarphone shipments in the first quarter of the year, according to IDC. While these lumped brands have a 42.2 percent market share, the top five brands led by Apple still cornered more than 50 percent of the market share.
Mary Grace Padin
Image credits: Stephanie Tumampos