The “gray market” for counterfeit mobile phones will...
The “gray market” for counterfeit mobile phones will continue to contract through the end of 2013, IHS iSuppli’s China Research Service said Wednesday. Worldwide shipments of counterfeit mobile phones are expected to drop by 12 percent in 2013, the China…
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Research Service said. Shipments of the counterfeits peaked in 2011 at 250.4 million gray-market phones; 194.6 million gray-market phones will ship through the end of this year, and 173.8 million are expected to ship in 2014, the China Research Service said. The gray market has been contracting as sales of feature phones have decreased dramatically in recent years, the China Research Service said. The market for ultra-low cost handsets and smartphones has continued to grow, but is not enough to offset the drop in feature phone sales. “A combination of supply and demand factors is causing demand to decline for gray-market cellphones,” said Kevin Wang, IHS’s director-China research. “On the demand side, the consumers in emerging markets who used to be the major purchasers of gray-market cellphones increasingly are preferring brand-name handsets. On the supply side, some gray-market handset makers have become branded manufacturers in order to promote their own names in developing countries” (http://bit.ly/12jACtl).