Motorola targets gain in China market share

Shanghai, May 30: Motorola Inc. is aiming to further expand its share in China, the world's second largest cellphone market, to match or beat its global average, a China executive said on Tuesday.

The company's rapid growth in China has come amid a global resurgence for Motorola, which was losing ground to rivals before starting to regain form over the last year.

Motorola's global market share stood at about 21 percent at the end of March, compared with 18.5 percent in China, Michael Tatelman, general manager for mobile devices in North Asia, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

''Our share in Asia, and in China specifically, should be equal to or slightly better than our global share,'' he said. ''We're investing significantly in this market, and in many markets around the world.'' About 100 million mobile phones were sold in China last year, compared with 150 million in the United States, the top market, according to industry data.

Motorola and Nokia, the world's biggest cellphone maker, have been the top two players in China from the get-go when the country first began building out its cellular networks in the 1990s.

But both giants, along with other foreign firms like Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., started to see their share slip about four years ago, as a field of homegrown upstarts with names like Ningbo Bird Co. Ltd. and TCL Communication Technology Holding Ltd. began to take a growing slice of the pie.

Motorola's share of the market declined steadily, standing at just 11 percent in the first quarter of last year before starting to rebound rapidly in the second part of the year.

Both Motorola and Nokia have shored up their positions by leveraging their deep research and development capabilities to develop models suited to the China market. At the same time, both have expanded their sales networks to China's smaller cities that are supplying many of the nation's new subscribers.

''We've more than doubled the number of shops that carry Motorola phones in the last year,'' Tatelman said.

''There's still a lot of work to do on infrastructure, to create less friction in our distribution system and make it easier for our customers to do business with us. ... In the smaller cities and counties, we still have a lot of work to do to bring coverage and efficiency.''

Reuters