单项选择题

Next month Britons will have yet more smartphones to choose from, when devices from Wiko, a two-year-old French company, go on sale. Wiko hopes that its phones, which in France start at around 70 Euros, will be as popular across Britain as at home. In 2013 nearly 7% of French first-time smartphone-buyers chose a Wiko. In early 2014 the firm claims to have been the second-biggest vendor in France. Wiko is not alone. In both rich countries and poor ones, cheaper smartphone brands are making inroads . Demand for costly phones, mainly in developed economies, is slowing, but that for less expensive devices is booming. People who will buy their first smartphones today perhaps care less about the brand and more about price than the richer, keener types of a few years ago. They are likely to pay less for a nice new smartphone than they did for their shabby old phone, because the cost of making smartphones has decreased. The declining cost of making phones means that buyers are getting more for their money. Two years ago the median price of a smartphone was $325. Last year it was $250. This year it may be $200. The cheapest phones will become cheaper still. All this is great for smartphone-buyers everywhere. It is less good news for the market leaders, Apple and Samsung—the only vendors making much money. Apple may evade being influenced by its operating system and apparently exceptional brand, although it has lately been selling cheaper iPhones. Samsung, which dominates the market for phones running on Google’ s Android operating system, may be more vulnerable. Granted, Samsung makes cheaper devices as well as dearer ones, and it can afford some slimming of its margins. But its problem, Mr. Jeronimo, a researcher from Internet Data Center, says, is that it carries lots of costs, in research and development and in marketing, that cheaper rivals do not. Samsung is doubtless wise to this. Hence its attempt to push beyond the smartphone, into smart watches and wristbands, connected domestic appliances and the business market. The weather of Mobile-phone brands is variable: ask Ericsson, HTC, Motorola and Nokia—the previous successful brands. Samsung has spent buckets of gold building its name. It will not want to be replaced by the Wikos of the world. From the first paragraph, we learn that______.