Smartphone brands eye market opportunities in 2023

Ti Gong

Several smartphone brands are eying market rebounds in 2023 with new products released this week, the first batch of industry releases in the Chinese New Year.

Firms including Realme and OnePlus have bet on innovations in eSports and fast charging to woo young consumers, hoping for a market rebound after the pandemic.

This year will be a year of "explosive growth" for the Chinese market, Xu Qi, Realme China's president, said on Thursday.

The company, which used to focus on overseas markets, will increase investment in China this year, with more offline outlets and a wider after-sales network covering all cities nationwide.

With their new model GT Neo 5, Realme has released 240-watt fast-charging and eSport-enhanced features, such as an enlarged memory of up to 1 TB, at a reasonable price of around 3,500 yuan (US$515).

Comparatively, other 1 TB models in the market, like iPhone 14, cost around 10,000 yuan.

Ti Gong

Also this week, OnePlus announced it will invest 100 million yuan over the next three years to establish a joint lab with Shanghai-based miHoYo, for mobile gaming experience optimization for the game Genshin Impact.

With the release of OnePlus Ace 2, the company will offer cloud gaming services for users, based on eight cloud computing centers globally with over 100,000 computer servers.

Firms are still confident in the domestic market in 2023, despite posting its worst performance in recent years last year.

According to researcher IDC, China's smartphone market sales were 286 million units in 2022, a 13.2 percent decrease from a year ago. It's the first time that domestic sales were below 300 million in the past decade.

The bigger players, including Vivo, OPPO and Honor, are expected to release new models in the coming month, analysts said.

Meanwhile, Samsung will officially release its new flagship model next week in Shanghai.