Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.'s smartphone sales are growing rapidly in China
Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.'s smartphone sales are growing rapidly in China even though many Google Inc. services on the phones are not available in the country, its chief executive said.
Sanjay Jha told Dow Jones Newswires in a recent interview the mobile handset maker has been able to work with local partners to deliver functions on its phones like email and maps which has enabled continued rapid sales. However, the lack of Google features may be a more significant problem for the company's Xoom tablets, he said, due to the centrality of those features to the user experience in other markets.
When Google partially withdrew from the China market last year over objections to censorship and alleged hacking, it stopped offering its suite of mobile services, including a mobile version of its email service, in China. That left handset makers using its Android mobile phone operating system scrambling for alternatives. Motorola has made a big bet globally to rely on the Android operating system for its line of smartphones, but in China its Android phones use Microsoft Corp.'s Bing and Baidu Inc., the local search leader, as default search engines.
"Some of the services that are available on most Android phones are not available here, so we have built relationships with Baidu and Microsoft to enable all of those applications to be available on our devices," Jha said.
Asked if those workarounds had hurt the user experience here, he said:"It's really for others to decide. We have worked to ensure that those services are available." The strategy of working with other partners to fill in the gaps appears to be working. Motorola sold 2.2 million smartphones in China last year, and in the first quarter of this year, it has shipped 1 million.
"So that at least shows you that we are growing our presence here quite nicely," Jha said.
Motorola's share of China's smartphone market in the first quarter was 7.5%, higher than its global market share of 4%, but still in fifth place behind players including Nokia Corp., Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., according to estimates by research firm Gartner.
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