by Hayati Nupus
JAKARTA, March 4 (Xinhua) -- Lili Handayani, 30, has been using the Redmi 4x since two years ago when many of her friends switched to the smartphones produced by a Chinese company. They liked the Chinese mobiles being affordable and with high capacities.
The 5-inch white smartphone with 3 GB RAM and 32 GB ROM has supported her busy activities as being an online media journalist in terms of researching, recording interviews, transcribing, writing news, taking photos and surfing social media.
"This smartphone really helps me to work smoothly. It looks stylish with high specifications and many features, while the price is affordable. Thus, I can save more money," Handayani told Xinhua.
Chinese smartphones have been dominating the mobile phone market in Indonesia over the last five years, with leading brands such as Xiaomi, Redmi, Oppo, Realmi and Vivo, said Didy Riandy, a manager at Kino Phone Cell in central Jakarta, which has sold hundreds of thousands of smartphones via e-commerce since October 2015.
Apart from Chinese brands, Indonesian consumers' favorite smartphones also include iPhone from the United State and Samsung from South Korea.
Specifications such as processor, memory capacity, camera and sound quality are the important factors taken into consideration by Indonesian consumers in choosing smartphones, Riandy said.
"The prices of Chinese smartphones are very competitive, with processor specifications, screen quality and capabilities above average," Riandy explained the reason why Indonesians fancy Chinese smartphones.
The head of the Trade Research and Development Agency of the Ministry of Trade, Kasan, said Indonesia is a lucrative market as the world's third largest smartphone consuming country after China and India.
In this Southeast Asian country 355.75 million pieces of smartphone were in use in 2020, posing an average growth of 5.53 percent per year.
"Complete features but affordable are suitable for the majority of Indonesians who belong to the lower-middle class. They pay attention to the price factor when buying items," Kasan said.
"The prospect of this (smartphone) market is still growing amidst the COVID-19 pandemic which has prompted offline activities to go online and the development of the digital economy," Kasan said.
A gadget expert from the Gadtorade community, Lucky Sebastian, said that Samsung once accounted for more than 50 percent of the smartphone market in Indonesia, but since about five years ago, that leading position was gradually taken over by Chinese products.
Marketers have promoted Chinese smartphones through flash sales on e-commerce platforms and made them a topic among people who failed to get the discounted price. They also promote the Chinese products in gadget enthusiast communities.
"The overwhelming presence of Chinese smartphones (in the market) targets Samsung's weak point in mid-range consumers with affordable phones," said Sebastian.
In general, the marketing strategies of Chinese and South Korean smartphone companies are the similar when entering the Indonesian market, he said.
They offered competitive prices to encourage people to shift to their products, he said, adding that this was the way Samsung did when years ago replacing other brands such as HTC, Motorola and Sony.
After dominating the market, they would increase the specifications of their products and raise prices, he added.
Now, most of the old brands are no longer seen in the Indonesian smartphone market, except Samsung, which still dominates the upper-middle market even though the company has started releasing cheap smartphones to reach lower-class consumers. And iPhone is another exception, which remains consistent with a 2 percent to 3 percent share of the market.
After successfully dominating the market, the challenge for Chinese smartphone companies in the future is how to keep their brands in the hearts of the Indonesian consumers.
"The Indonesian market is very dynamic as in every period, it is very possible to change," said Sebastian. ■