Smartphone companies in Vietnam are expanding their production efforts in a bid to take on global industry leaders like Samsung — which currently dominates the Vietnamese smartphone market — according to Nikkei.
The uptick in the country’s homegrown smartphone production includes new entrants to the market, such as Vingroup, a property developer which has announced it plans to start manufacturing smartphones this year. According to the report, another Vietnamese firm called Asanzo is predicted to make 600,000 smartphones in 2018, up from just 12,000 in 2017.
Bkav’s Bphone, the first smartphone ever manufactured in Vietnam.
While some firms are apparently leaning towards low-priced entry-level models, Bkav is the company behind Bphone — the first smartphone to be manufactured in Vietnam — which launched in 2015. Bphone is classed as a high-end handset but is priced 40% less than the iPhone. A successor to the device is rumoured for release this summer.
Nikkei says that Samsung currently leads the pack in Vietnam with a 46.5% share of the market, followed by Oppo with 19.4% and Apple with 9.2%. The report also says that the Vietnamese smartphone industry has grown by 10% annually, doubling its sales from 2014 to 2017, up to 15 million units.
