Chinese smartphone brands drive AI proliferation in 2024, led by Oppo

The second half of 2024 is expected to see a further proliferation of generative AI use-cases, driven by Chinese smartphone brands such as Oppo, Nothing, and Vivo, especially in lower price tiers, according to analysts and industry executives.

“Smartphones are the perfect carriers for AI functionalities due to their comprehensive input and output capacities and their ever-increasing hardware capabilities, particularly in AI computing power,” said Counterpoint Research in a recent report.

The research firm added that the second half of 2024 will see more smartphone models with AI models deployed locally or accessible through the cloud. It added that the brands need to figure out use cases or key killer applications and bring them to segments beyond the premium flagships.

Chinese smartphone brand Oppo, this week, said it has rolled out over 100 genAI capabilities to its phones this year and has filed over 5,399 AI patents worldwide. It said that its flagship phones will be powered by large language models from Google and Microsoft to power features such as AI-powered suggestive writing tools, recording summaries, and language translation.

“We believe that the intelligent OS will be embedded with AI Agents and support multimodal interaction, meanwhile the third-party services will be provided more flexibly. This will result in a full-stack transformation and ecosystem restructuring of AI phones.” said Nicole Zhang, general manager, AI product, at Oppo.

Counterpoint said Oppo is bringing genAI to all of its smartphone product lines in 2024, expecting around 50 million AI devices from the company shipped globally. Overall, AI phones will contribute to 11% of the global smartphone market by the year’s end, it said.

It added that Chinese brands have captured six positions in a global list of top-10 AI phones.

“Leading Chinese brands like Xiaomi, vivo, HONOR and OPPO are aggressively integrating GenAI features across their offerings, including features like AI-generated portraits, AI eraser tools and robust offline virtual assistants,” the research firm said.

Research firm IDC in a separate report, said AI phone shipments in the sub-$1000 will surge 250% on-year in 2024, reaching 35 million units globally.

Nothing co-founder Carl Pei, outlining the company’s next handset, said the smartphone is the undeniable form factor leading the consumer AI technology revolution, adding that there is a need to redefine the user-interface which has stayed stagnant for a decade, to integrate AI at a system level and enable a personalised and dynamic user experience.

Korean brand Samsung had an early head-start in the fast-growing segment with the Galaxy S24 series, dominating the market in Q1 2024 with a 58% market share. The company, Friday, announced it will be bringing its Galaxy AI experience to its foldable devices.