What's most interesting: The small Chinese Android makers are the only ones that are gaining really fast market share. Vivo and Oppo have 130+% YOY.
Yep, that's true. Just take a look at those Chinese webshops which are selling those Chinese Android phones. There are lots of 'em and their prices are very decent.
Two of my colleagues have ordered and are now using Chinese Elephone Android phones. They've been quite satisfied with their phones so I guess their price/quality level is quite OK. Plus nowadays Chinese manufacturers offer pretty good specs compared to their prices and the prices of those brand manufacturers' phones. Maybe people have realized that you don't have to pay 700-1000 € (well at least here in Finland) to get a decent phone?
If we take a look at the selling prices and the manufacturing prices (my estimation), I presume the average manufacturing price per phone is approx. 100 € at max. Well, if you're selling the phone model with the price of 700 - 1000 €, there's quite much "air and "brand value" in the price of a phone. Some of those Chinese manufacturers have their own webshops so there are no whole and retail sellers taking their own share of the price of the phone.
Which brings me to the idea that Microsoft should've sold their phones from their own webshop and their prices (even @ the retailers) should've been more decent. If your market share is very tiny, you just cannot put the same price tag on the phone that Apple and Samsung does, even though you're a very established manufacturer / well-known company. Here in Europe the price of Lumia 950XL used to be 699€, now it's close to 400€. What's the point of placing a sky high price tag on the phone if there are only few customers who are gonna buy that phone with that price (and then afterwards drop the price almost at half) when you could put the price tag of 400€ there right away and maybe gain some more market share in this difficult situation???
€ = Euro (the currency of the most European Union countries), equals to 1.18 USD or so.
Edit: last year that afore mentioned Elephone announced that they would've released a dual booting phone with Android 5.1 and WIN10. I was about to purchase that phone but then they unfortunately scrapped the whole idea. So yesterday I pre-ordered Zopo Speed 8 Android phone directly from the manufacturer's webshop. The price was 279.99 USD. Take a look at the specs:
http://www.zopomobile.com/speed-8/ . Pretty good specs, at least on paper...