“The growth of the segment was higher than the initial forecasts of 20% last year. The smartphone market went up by about 27% to some 3.5 million units. Smartphones accounted for 90% of the value of a market that reached EUR650 million last year,” said Cristian Cojocaru, head of the telecom division with Samsung Romania, the leader of the local smartphone market with a market share of more than 40%.
Smartphones, whose sales have increased more than tenfold in the past six years, are transforming the way companies work and making them create new business models. The central role smartphones are starting to have in business is because of their high processing power – greater than the old computers’, and the multitude of in-built sensors and the Internet connection, which allows companies almost constant access to customers from a device they carry with them.
“The smartphone is everything to us, mobile phones are clearly core business for us and will become for all industries. As the taxi industry moved to mobile phones, so will the rest,” says Mihai Rotaru, chief executive officer of Clever Tech, the company behind the mobile taxi app Clever Taxi, whose business started when the smartphone sales skyrocketed. In its four years in business, the company processed more than 12 million taxi rides, according to the data available in mid last year.
The processing power and the sensors smartphones have create new opportunities for business.
“The processing power of a smartphone is now much greater than that of a computer 15 years ago, and this creates some opportunities. Many complex applications can be run on smartphones. They have various sensors, GPS, pedometer, which provide opportunities for applications and cooperation between companies. Data is available now to make decisions on for many things that used to be estimated until now,” said Aurelian Sin, member of the CIO Council, an association of chief information officers on the local market and CIO of US automotive component company Federal Mogul for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
The fast-paced growth in the sales of smartphones also caused changes on the banking market, enabling customers to manage their accounts via the mobile phone.
Michal Szcurek, chief executive officer of ING Bank Romania, told ZF in an interview last year that 2016 might be the year of mobile phones in Romania.
“The number of interactions via the mobile phone equaling those generated from desktop PCs in Romania was something no one would have imagined three years ago, when it stood at about 3%. The mobile phone will take over in 2016,” he said.
The smartphone market has seen spectacular growth in the past three years, more than 50%. Sales of smartphones stood at about one million units in Romania in 2012 and more than 2.5 million in 2014.
The market will continue to grow and sales of smartphones should exceed 4 million units this year, according to Samsung estimates. Smartphones will account for 70% to 80% of the phones sold and for 90% of the sales value.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)