China Become the Largest Market for Active Smart Devices

China has surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest market for active smart devices, expecting to represent 246 million active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets at the end of February, compared with 230 million in the U.S., according to mobile analytics firm Flurry.

Flurry said it was unlikely China would relinquish that crown anytime soon.

“The U.S. will not take back the lead from China, given the vast difference in population per country,” Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, said in a statement. “China has over 1.3 billion people while the U.S. has just over 310 million. Considering that the U.S. has the world’s third-largest population, the only other country that could feasibly overtake China sometime in the future is India, with a population of just over 1.2 billion.”

Undoubtedly, China’s huge population contributes most to this result, or other related data, such as China outpaced German to be the largest photovoltaic market, China become the fastest-growing LED lighting market, as huge population bring the most important advantage of consumer market; along with the government support and cheaper price, we will more “first or largest” happen on China.

However, on the manufacturing side, China will face the risk of slowdown. China in the past has prided to be the largest manufacturing country, but recently, the manufacturing boom began to shift to Southern Asian countries including Indonesia and Thailand, even back to the U.S, due to the rise of labor cost, of land cost. Let’s image, what result will encounter China and its huge employees. So industry transformation and technology innovation shows a lot of significance to China. But there seems no significant change.

Here, I feel doubt to China’s policy support. Taking China’s LED industry in 2012 as an example, in fact, China’s LED market was very mess, surrounding by serious oversupply, sharply price decline as well as counterfeit products or low-quality LED lighting products. The bright future of LED industry indeed is an important factor, but government’s support strengthens the situation of over enterprises participating in this industry. Therefore, if without moderate support, the model of mess market-industry merger-large shuffle may be a repeated road for many industries.