Slaughter

Apple and Samsung 'to be slaughtered'

Samsung’s Galaxy S6 might be a big hit now, but Kirt McMaster thinks the brand’s days are numbered.

THE CEO of the biggest smartphone software makers in the world believes that Samsung and Apple’s reign of the smartphone world could be heading the way of Nokia and BlackBerry.

In an interview with Business Insider, CEO of Cyanogen Kirt McMaster argues that smartphone dominance by Samsung and Apple will be “slaughtered” in the next five years by smaller smartphone makers.

Mr McMaster’s company has recently partnered with Qualcomm, the company that makes the chips inside just about every non-iPhone. The deal sees Qualcomm offering manufacturers the use of the Cyanogen software with any device that uses their chips, making it easy for any new brand to come into the market.

This “turnkey” style deal is what Mr McMaster believes will be the downfall of big manufacturers like Samsung.

“Over the course of the next 3-5 years, it will impact every market on the planet. It’s mostly being felt now in emerging markets. The reason it’s being impacted there is because of the turnkey model. It allows these local OEMs to arise out of nothing.” McMaster said.

“On the global platform, we see Xiaomi becoming the No. 3 OEM. Micromax is now No. 10. These guys are basically creating really cheap handsets that have really awesome performance. This is made possible because of Qualcomm’s turnkey solution as well as Mediatek’s.

“The tier one OEMs like Samsung are going to be the next generation Nokias in the next five years. They’re going to be slaughtered. We think long term Apple itself will have problems because they’re just not good at competing at the low end.”

Like Mr McMaster mentioned, companies like Xiaomi are already disrupting the market.

You’d be forgiven if you had never heard of Xiaomi before, but as of December last year the company became the highest selling smartphone maker in China, and the third biggest in the world. For a company that was founded in 2010, that’s pretty impressive.

Other Chinese companies like OPPO are doing the same thing, dominating the big guys by offering a great hardware and software experience for a much cheaper price.

“It could get pretty bad pretty damn quick [for Samsung]. This is often the case. Look what happened to Research In Motion (RIM). Look what happened to Nokia. Last summer Micromax surpassed Samsung as the dominant feature phone player in India. We’re talking literally in eight months this occurred,” McMaster said.

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