UK: knives are out already for Mobile sales at Xmas 08!

No sooner have we crossed the mid-point of February (highlighted nicely with Valentine’s Day!), than a story about Xmas 08 appears - stop the madness! Where will it all end!?

Anyway, this story is about the battlelines being drawn up for Christmas as regards what the “hero” devices might be - in the Prepay segment (i.e. those which often sell in supermarkets).

Apparently, supermarket chains have been out at MWC, and industry experts are saying that the traditional Mobile sales pandemonium this year will be led by 5MP camera devices (such as the Nokia N95 above), in a £80-100 tier.
This would mean an extremely interesting period before Xmas, where both retailers and device vendors are scrabbling to up their numbers for Q4 - of course, what will be the prepay handsets are actually already in circulation, since they drip down from being “new postpay” to “cheap prepay” over the course of the year.

As you might expect, big players will be Nokia, SE, Samsung and LG - all with established devices in circulation - this shouldn’t rule out new devices coming on to the market though!

Last year in the MNOs, it was Orange who dived deepest, with 000,000’s of LG handsets in an super-cheap £10-20 tier. In the supermarkets, obviously bitter rivals Sainsbury’s and Tesco were major players - and this year you can be sure both these chains had buyers at MWC, making the deals for Xmas.

Of course, lest we not forget the other major forces in UK retail - Argos (a UK chain, where you buy from a catalogue in store and then the products are delivered via conveyor belt to you from a store room upstairs!) is a pivotal retailer as far as some vendors are concerned - judging by how full my local Argos was last Xmas, I would certainly not disagree!

So, it will be interesting to see how the retail landscape for Mobile devices plays out this year - and whether those 5MP prepay devices will be the difference-maker!

[Via: Mobile Today]