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China's budget handset makers facing mass cull
China’s mobile phone market is set for a massive shake-up as hundreds of so-called 'white box' handset makers based in the country go bankrupt as a result of increasing competition at the low end of the market from established, big name domestic players such as Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo. Digitimes reported that the three big …
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Friday 30th March 2012 11:44 GMT Paul Shirley
writing was on the wall last year
It was pretty obvious their time was up when I noticed even the useless Java based, fake China phones cost more to import than buying genuine budget Android's here in the UK. Even the genuine Chinese Android ones were consistently much lower spec for the same cash. That was 6 months ago or so.
Economics is harsh, not even forgers are safe from the combination of competition shaving margins and scale shaving costs ;)
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Saturday 31st March 2012 10:20 GMT Version 1.0
Eventually it all falls down
The writings been there for a long time - when I was in Beijing about 5 years ago I bought a few of their consumer products from the market stores for research. After returning home and stripping them down it was clear that they were heading for disaster because the quality of the workmanship was terrible and eventually the user is going to notice that the USB stick that tells the operating system that it's got 4Gb of storage can't actually store more than 512kB of data.
I'm still unconvinced that China is going to survive in the long term once the countryside starts to want what the cities have.
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