China’s Top 3 Android Manufacturers: HTC, Motorola, and Samsung [UMeng Report]

HTC, Motorola, and Samsung claim the top three spots in China’s white-hot Android handset market, according to a new report [in Chinese] by app analytics startup UMeng (友盟).

The Death of Shanzhai is Greatly Exaggerated

The market today is as consolidated as it will ever be–the ‘big three’ hold 65% market share together. Compare that to the feature-phone market, which is fractured among hundreds of small Shanzhai manufacturers in southern China, making ‘Motolobas’ and ‘Noklas’. Today’s smartphone market has high technology requirements, from chipset to touch screen, that Shanzhai manufacturers can’t match.

But rumors of the death of Shanzhai are greatly exaggerated. The Android market will only become more fractured from here. It’ll take time and there may not be hundreds of manufacturers as there are in feature-phones, but I fully expect smaller Chinese manufacturers to get in the game.

Case-in-point, the Xiaomi Phone was announced just last week, a 2000 RMB 1.5 GHz gadget that screams iPhone in its design and its modded Android OS. In the coming years I think we’ll see far cheaper and far more shameless copycat devices. Shanzhai will gradually be reborn in the smartphone market.

To track the transformation, look no further than Innovation Works-backed startup UMeng and its reports.

Android is white-hot in China: UMeng’s Top 100 Android Apps Grew 300-400%

UMeng also found that its top 100 apps gained 300% users in the first six months of 2011. Sessions (uses of those apps) grew by 400%. The insane Android growth curve that we’ve been waiting for has arrived.