Samsung Ends Mobile Phone Production in China

Ju-min Park, reporting for Reuters:

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd has ended mobile telephone production in China, it said on Wednesday, hurt by intensifying competition from domestic rivals in the world’s biggest smartphone market.

The shutdown of Samsung’s last China phone factory comes after it cut production at the plant in the southern city of Huizhou in June and suspended another factory late last year, underscoring stiff competition in the country. […]

Samsung’s share of the Chinese market shrank to 1% in the first quarter from around 15% in mid-2013, as it lost out to fast-growing homegrown brands such as Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi Corp, according to market research firm Counterpoint.

“In China, people buy low-priced smartphones from domestic brands and high-end phones from Apple or Huawei. Samsung has little hope there to revive its share,” said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment & Securities.

A drop from 15 percent to nearly zero in just 6 years in the world’s most populous country is a precipitous collapse, but there’s a huge upside to Samsung in this: they’re completely out from under the thumb of an oppressive communist regime.

Apple’s dependence upon China for manufacturing nearly all its major products, along with its reliance upon the Chinese market as its second largest, puts the company at risk economically (subjecting them to the whims of a dictatorship in China and wannabe dictatorship domestically — the latter proving to be far more erratic) and ethically (best exemplified by China’s escalating crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong).

★ Thursday, 3 October 2019