Meizu unveils new flagship smartphone

Chinese smartphone vendor Meizu Technology Co, known for its cheaper look-alikes of Apple Inc's iPhone, took the wraps off its new flagship device on Tuesday in a bid to upstage bigger global rivals that are set to introduce new models shortly.

Sporting a 5.36-inch display and an eight-core mobile processor, the Meizu MX4 goes on sale starting at 1,799 yuan ($291.79), Bai Yongxiang, Meizu's senior vice president, announced at an event in Beijing on Tuesday.

The new model is slated to hit the shelves on September 20, according to Bai, who also revealed the company's plans to expand its network of retail experience outlets that appear to be clones of Apple Stores to 20 at the end of the year before achieving the target of 60 by 2015.

The announcement came one day ahead of Samsung Electronics Co's release of its big-screen smartphone lineup and one week prior to Apple's much-awaited launch of its next-generation iPhone.

Analysts, however, are less optimistic about the prospects of the Zhuhai, South China's Guangdong Province-based phone maker, which made inroads into the smartphone business in 2006 but has yet to capture a substantial share of the domestic market.

"Meizu has been confined to a small niche of the market, despite their having a certain group of fans over the past several years," Wang Jun, an industry analyst with Beijing-based consultancy Analysys International, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Compared to Meizu, mainly a hardware manufacturer, the likes of Xiaomi Inc that are adept at marketing products alongside the rise of mobile Internet in the country have been doing much better, Wang said.

Beijing-based smartphone maker Xiaomi was close to unseating Samsung in the Chinese mainland's marketplace for smartphones as measured by shipments in the second quarter of the year, taking a 13.5 percent share of the market versus Samsung's 15.4 percent, data from Analysys International showed.

Lenovo held onto third spot with a 10.8 percent market share. Apple was fifth with a 6.9 percent share, while Meizu was not among the top 10 in the local market, according to the research agency's statistics.

Among the new phones that are expected to arrive in the mainland market soon, Apple's iPhone 6 would probably be on the best-seller list, Wang from Analysys believes, predicting that Apple may come back to claim a position among the top five vendors in the market although there will not be any shake-up.

China Mobile's Beijing branch has already begun preorders for the next-generation iPhone on its website since Monday. As of 11 pm on Tuesday, the preorders had totaled 40,443. Preorders for the phone are also available on the WeChat account of China Telecom's Shanghai branch, with the number reaching 5,576 as of 11 pm. China Unicom is yet to begin taking preorders, an employee at China Unicom's 10010 hotline said when contacted by the Global Times Tuesday.

In anticipation of a buying binge worldwide of new iPhone models, Lu Ting, chief China economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said in a note sent to the Global Times on Tuesday that the iPhone, assembled in the mainland, could add about 1 percent per month to the mainland's export growth for the rest of 2014.