Oberthur Technologies will assist in the deployment of Samsung Pay in Europe
Samsung is preparing to launch its own mobile payments platform, called Samsung Pay, later this year and the company has chosen to partner with Oberthur Technologies in order to launch the service in Europe. Oberthur Technologies provides end-to-end service for digital payments and will help deploy Samsung Pay in several European countries. Samsung Pay is set to compete with other mobile payments services that are also expected to be launched in Europe later in the year.
Mobile payments continue to grow among consumers
Samsung Pay is designed to allow people to make purchases from their phones. While this is not a novel feature, the platform can be used in physical stores to make payments, replacing credit cards and cash. The platform makes use of NFC technology, which is capable of transmitting digital information over short distances. With an NFC-enabled mobile device, consumers will be able to use Samsung Pay in stores that have NFC-enabled point-of-sale systems. Currently, a relatively small number of retailers support such technology, but that is changing as mobile payments become more popular.
Samsung intends to uphold the convenience of mobile transactions
Mobile payments have become an important focus for companies like Samsung. These companies see a great deal of promise in the mobile payments space, as consumers have shown great favor for platforms that allow them to make payments in convenient ways. This convenience is the soul of mobile payments and has been one of the sector’s most attractive features. Samsung is hoping to make its payments service as convenient as possible in order to ensure that it is appealing to consumers.
Samsung will have to fight for attention amongst other companies involved in mobile payments
Samsung Pay is expected to come pre-installed on the new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge devices. These devices are likely to be launched later this year. Samsung will have to compete aggressively in order to win the favor of merchants and consumers alike, vying for attention against other companies that have launched similar mobile payments service in the past few months.
Although the South Korean handset manufacturer had previously lost its crown, it appears to have regained it.
By the end of last year, Samsung had managed to make its way back up the list in smartphone trends by shipping about the same number of handsets as Apple, but the news for the South Korean tech giant has continued to improve according to some of the latest stats.
Samsung has now moved its way back to the top spot for the number of smartphones shipped.
These smartphone trends are based on the number of shipments that the company made during the first quarter of this year. During the first three months of 2015, Samsung shipped 83.2 million mobile phones, which represents an increase over the 74.5 million that it shipped during the last quarter of 2014 when it had pretty much matched Apple’s numbers.
At the same time, these smartphone trends weren’t as favorable for Apple, which saw its shipments fall.
From January through March, iPhone shipments dropped to the level of 61.2 million, putting the company in second place behind Samsung. Both of those companies remain well ahead of the third place manufacturers, which are Lenovo/Motorola. Together, they shipped a much lower 18.8 million smartphones during the same period of time. That said, closely behind those two was Huawei, which managed to send 17.3 million devices out the door of its own warehouse during the first quarter of the year.
This data was presented by Strategy Analytics, which assembled the shipment and market share figures for the top players in the mobile technology industry. According to that firm, Samsung took in a 24.1 percent global smartphone market share. It also placed Apple at 17.7 percent of the worldwide share of the market. Lenovo/Motorola held 5.4 percent and Huawei had a firm grip on 5 percent.
Strategy Analytics also went on to release a range of additional feature phone and smartphone trends figures with regards to their shipments around the globe. That helped to show that Microsoft’s performance in this sector is not nearly as good as what that company had likely been hoping to achieve. After all, the figures revealed that Microsoft had seen a 33 percent drop in its mobile phone shipments in the first quarter of 2015, when compared to the same quarter in 2014.
