Samsung beats Apple in acquiring first-time smartphone owners, while Apple wins in conversions
New figures from CIRP reported in Fortune show that both Samsung and Apple get the bulk of their smartphone sales from existing users of their respective platforms, but Samsung does better at attracting featurephone buyers while Apple does better at converting Samsung owners.
Samsung gets 43 percent of its customers from existing Android users (a mix of Samsung loyalists and customer acquisitions from HTC and Motorola), virtually identical to Apple’s figure of 42 percent for existing iPhone users.
Samsung’s low-end Android handsets helped it acquire 37 percent of its customers from featurephone owners, against 26 percent for Apple. The bad news for the company was that Apple wins three times as many smartphone customers from Samsung as Samsung does from Apple: 20 percent switched from a Samsung handset to an iPhone, while only 7 percent switched in the opposite direction.
Samsung’s Next Big Thing ad campaign, aimed specifically at younger users, also hasn’t been as successful as the company might have hoped, with Apple maintaining its younger age-profile.
