| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 企業管理碩士專班 === 98 === The rapid growth of the smartphone industry had attracted new entrants to join the competition. Due to the emergence of Android, a free mobile platform, and the trend of aggressive price competition in the industry, most companies no longer only targeted on business users or high-end consumers and gradually expanded the scope of target customers to reach mass consumers. Price promotion became their main strategy. Price promotions usually require mobile network operators to subsidize phone makers in exchange for binding user contracts with operators'' mobile Internet access plans. Thus, they helped to penetrate the service subscriptions of mobile Internet access and created more business opportunities for mobile Internet services.
Besides making phone calls, in general the key value of smartphone is to provide users the capability of instant information access in anywhere and anytime, such as enabling users to search Internet, read information, send or receive emails…etc. Therefore, its value is strongly related with the breadth and depth of mobile information services. There are network externalities effect between the demands for smartphones and mobile information services: the increasing popularity of mobile information services will stimulate smartphone sales, and vice versa. This characteristic is the key idea of thesis research to analyze competitive strategies for own-brand phone makers.
In this thesis, an abstract view of smartphone is illustrated at first to bring the concept of information-centric usage. The ways of information delivery, viewing, and processing in a smartphone are explored. Then, various information types and value chains are discussed for service innovations followed by the analysis of the industry supply chain and the five dominant mobile platforms'' pros and cons. Lastly, the worldwide top four own-brand phone makers are selected for analyzing their product roadmaps, product line effectiveness, technical characteristics and trends. This thesis concludes with five strategic suggestions for top four phone makers.
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