Apple and Samsung Dominate Where It Counts

The smartphone business is cutthroat, and no one can stay on top for long. Even tech industry die-hards would have had trouble predicting that two Chinese upstarts, Oppo and Vivo, would come out of nowhere to collectively sell one in 10 new smartphones worldwide, as they did this spring.

My Gadfly colleague Tim Culpan wrote a compelling column about how Chinese smartphone brands have their sights set on the U.S. and will inevitably steal sales in a country where Apple and Samsung sell a majority of smartphones -- a much larger market share than they have in other parts of the world. I'm not sure Tim is right. It's hard for relatively unknown brands to catch on in the U.S., at least not without expensive marketing campaigns or buying a brand already well known, as Lenovo did by purchasing IBM's ThinkPad laptop business a decade ago.1471881203852