With Samsung Pay linking to Hong Kong’s Octopus card, world’s smartphone leader is looking beyond specs as Chinese phones pose larger threat
By providing the first mobile payment service that can be linked to the Octopus card, Samsung is showing its desire to cater to locals’ lifestyles. But is it enough for them to remain loyal when cheaper Chinese phones abound?
Samsung is still the leader in the smartphone market, but with increasingly intense competition from Chinese phonemakers – Huawei, for example, has now overtaken Apple to become the world’s second largest mobile phone brand in terms of shipments – the South Korean giant can no longer focus on specs alone, says one of the company’s Hong Kong-based senior executives.
Yiyin Zhao, head of IT and mobile communications at Samsung Hong Kong, agrees that Hongkongers have more spending power and much wider access to different phone brands, and thus making them among the hardest group of phone users to impress.
This was evident during last Thursday’s Hong Kong launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. Zhao’s keynote speech was only a couple of minutes long and it barely touched on the handset’s impressive raw specs at all. Instead, the event focused on how the Note 9 fit into Samsung’s digital ecosystem, particularly Samsung Pay, the first and only mobile payment service that can be linked to Hong Kong’s predominant contactless stored value card, the Octopus card.
Zhao, who has been at Samsung Hong Kong since 2009, says the partnership between Samsung Hong Kong and Octopus, which was announced officially last December, had been years in the making.
“Everyone in Hong Kong uses Octopus,” Zhao says. “So it was important for us to build a localised service for Hongkongers. It has been a mutual partnership. I think Octopus chose us because of our ability to deliver advanced, user-friendly and secure features.”
But Zhao concedes that Hong Kong is a tough market due to the flood of Chinese handsets offering more for less. For example, Xiaomi announced last week a new handset with the exact same Snapdragon 845 processor as the Note 9, but priced at around HK$2,799 (US$360). The Note 9’s starting price is HK$7,698.