MP3 market in China
2008-07-30

Since 2000, as the MP3 player entered into the China market, the mp3 market grew quickly, nearly enhance 200 percent year per year. At the beginning period, the brands of Korea, Japan, America and the like occupied the MP3 market of China. But since 2005, Chinese domestic brands broke the market domination of Korean and Japanese brands, and become the dominate brands in the market.

In the meantime, 2005 saw a continuous explosion of MP3 player market in China. MP3 players entered the sales channels of home appliances, shops, even music and book stores, besides traditional IT markets. After making progress in capacity, function, design and audiovisual integration, MP3 player market showed trends of further market segmentation and product segmentation. Competition tends to be heavier.

At the beginning of 2007, there were lots of MP3 brands, but in 2008, many brands gradually quit the market and there are now only a few major brands, like Aigo, Newman and so on, in the MP3 market, specifically in the pure audio MP3 player market. On amount of the high quality and strong capabilities of the products, among these Chinese domestic brands, some brands are warmly welcomed by consumers.

In 2006, as the demand of the functions, and the volumes, not a few manufacturers laughed the G capacity products, enhancing the technology to a higher stage. Relying on a report from the CCID June 2008, 1G Products Become Mainstream, And demand for 2G Products Increases: With G capacity products' price drop and products' capacity becoming larger, the structure of the MP3 player market has large changes. By the end of April, the shares of 256M and 512M products further shrank, and will gradually withdraw from the market. G capacity products have almost become the mainstream of player products. 1G product have had steady growth, whose share is 53.17%; the share of 2G products has largely improved, whose share is 13.72%.

But, now, China's Video MP3 Market enters a slack season and the trend is in decline. Lacking of the new functions and the sell points, moreover, the mp3 market is mature and substitute products such as PMP, music mobile phones and so on cause the consumers in diffluence. Many consumers prefer to purchase a high function music mobile phone within high price rather buy a MP3 player. According to the report issued by CCID Consulting, compared with the same period of the previous year, in the 3rd quarter of 2007, the gross sales volume of MP3 players in China was 1.6148million, reduced by 12.06%, and sales value reached RMB 791 million Yuan, down by 9.08%. The gross sales of flat panel TV sets in China in the first three quarters of 2007 reached 5.0061 million and the sales value was 2.39 billion Yuan. NEWMAN, despite its leading sales volume of video MP3s, saw a declining sales volume in the third quarter as compared with the second quarter.

So, in order to improve the sales volume of the Chinese MP3 market, the MP3 players should have considerable progress in capacity, function, appearance design and audiovisual. Aigo, Newman and other leading domestic manufacturers should continue to launch their new products so as to cater to consumers' demands.