Tizen ranked fourth top system

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Tizen ranked fourth top system

Samsung’s Tizen operating system, perceived as the underdog OS, saw an increased market share and consolidated its position as the No. 4 most-used smartphone platform in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to Strategy Analytics on Friday.

Tizen is trailing behind global market leaders such as Google’s Android system, which held the top position. Following Android is Apple’s iOS and Windows OS by Microsoft.

Tizen maintained the rank for two consecutive quarters as the tech giant has focused on producing Tizen-powered budget phones to wean itself off the dominant Android system.

Some 900,000 Tizen-backed smartphones were sold between October and December, four times more than in the first quarter of 2015, according to the report.

Entering 2015, the number stood at 200,000 units in the first quarter and rose to 800,000 in the second quarter.

In the third quarter, Samsung’s proprietary system surpassed the Blackberry operating system to become the fourth most-used platform. But Blackberry captured the fourth spot when counting statistics for the full year.

The report predicted that Tizen will gain traction going forward, backed by demand in emerging markets.

“India, Bangladesh and Nepal maintain the key countries for Tizen OS,” said Linda Sui, author of the report. “Given Samsung’s brand equity and well-established distribution channel in India and other emerging markets, Tizen OS is well-positioned to grow further.”

As noted, the operating system tapped into the growing popularity of its Tizen-powered budget phones like the Z1 and Z3.

In India, Tizen holds the second-largest market share in the budget phone segment.

Still, it has to go a long way to catch up with dominant leading players. The duopoly held by Android and iOS on the world’s smartphone market intensified in 2015, with each controlling 81.4 percent and 16.1 percent of the market, respectively.

The combined proportion of the two was 97.5 percent in 2015, compared to 96.3 percent in 2014.

The report also noted that Samsung has to pool resources to deliver a better ecosystem.

“It is still at the very early stage, and it takes time to build up a decent ecosystem with multiple models and services across multiple price tiers in a wide number of markets,” the author said.

The researcher suggested that Samsung focus on using Tizen on wearable products to gain market share.


BY PARK EUN-JEE [park.eunjee@joongang.co.kr]




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