Apple Inc’s legal row over its iPad trademark in China creates a window of opportunity for rivals such as Lenovo Group Ltd and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd as they try to chip away at the US firm’s dominance of the potentially vast Chinese tablet market.
Apple, the world’s most valuable technology company, is fighting lawsuits brought by debt-laden Chinese electronics maker Proview Technology (Shenzhen), causing retailers and resellers in more than 10 Chinese cities to take iPads off their shelves, according to media reports.
Apple’s iPad enjoys a huge lead over rival tablet PCs in China with a 76 percent share. Lenovo and Samsung trail a distant second and third with about 7 percent and 3 percent respectively, data from research firm IDC showed.
‘Apple’s loss could be Lenovo and Samsung`s gains’, said Jonathan Ng, an analyst with CIMB in Singapore.
Samsung likely has most to gain, because its Galaxy tablet competes in the same price segment as the iPad.
‘Samsung will probably benefit more from Apple’s ongoing lawsuit because both of them are after the same higher-end consumers given their price points’, said Dickie Chang, an analyst from IDC in Hong Kong.
‘The impact on Lenovo may be less because Lepads are lower priced and are aimed more at entry-level users’.
A basic iPad 2 typically costs 3,688 yuan or $585, roughly the same price as 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, while some models of Lenovo’s Lepad were selling at roughly half that price on online retail sites.
IDC said in the third quarter Apple sold about 1.3 million iPads in China, while Lenovo, the world’s second largest PC maker, sold around 120,000 Lepads in its home market and South Korea’s Samsung sold 58,000 Galaxy Tabs.
The Lepad and Galaxy Tab both run on Google Inc’s Android operating system.
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