Korea's largest electronics maker, Samsung Electronics, aims to lead the MP3 player market by developing a software player and music store similar to that of iTunes. They figure that the main reason Apple leads the market with its iPod is due to how successful its iTunes service has become as well as it being an interface for the iPod. Where Samsung is at an advantage here is that they aim to target China and Southeast Asian countries where their MP3 players are already selling quite well, yet countries where iTunes has not reached, not to mention how poorly the iPod is doing in South Korea.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the global market, Samsung has only sold around 1.7 million MP3 players under the Yepp brand last year, which is only a small fraction of the number of iPods sold by Apple. When Samsung began producing MP3 players, they originally started with Flash based models, however later on moved to hard disk models due to their higher capacity. However, Samsung claims that the iPod's success has only affected them to a minimum extent and that they have high hopes to overcome the bigger competitor. They expect to become one of the three leading MP3 player manufacturers in 2007, with a 25% to 30% global market share.
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``We are now in talks with our partners to debut a service program like iTunes of Apple. Our No. 1 priority is to help customers use our products with ease,'' the 54-year-old said. ``Our items show healthy performances in China and Southeast Asian countries where iTunes services are not provided,'' he added. |
So far, quite a lot of companies have tried offering 'iPod killers' to the market, however no matter what features they have offered, many were lucky to get many sales, not to mention getting anywhere near the sales to that of the iPod. For example, while Sony lead the market in the cassette tape based walkman days, they failed completely when it came to digital audio players. Their best success has been in Japan where they succeeded in taking over iPod Shuffle sales, however other than that the iPod leads pretty much elsewhere.
Now, it will be interesting to see how well Samsung does. At least their prime target will be countries where the iTunes service has not yet been made available. China will be an interesting place to launch an online music store. With such a high piracy rate in China when it comes to CDs and cassettes, I cannot see an online music store suddenly start luring consumers away from counterfeit music. :p
Source: The Korea Times
