Samsung is one of the world’s biggest tech manufacturers and global leaders in smartphone sales. However, the company’s mobile business hasn’t been on stable grounds in 2014.

The Korean tech giant officially announced it would be making 25 to 30% fewer phone models in 2015, shifting its focus to flagship devices and component standardization across mid-to-low-end models, so that they can leverage economies of scale.

This shift in strategy seems quite warranted, especially since Samsung has been having some deep troubles in some markets.

Samsung is not so popular in China anymore

Most importantly in China, competitors like Apple and Xiaomi are breathing down Samsung’s neck more avidly than before.

A new report coming out of CCID Consulting shows as that Samsung has shed up to 31.5% of its market share in the Chinese market last year.

More alarmingly, back in January 2014, Samsung was named king of the hill, holding dominion of up to 20% of the market. Then a few months later, in October its shares had steeply fallen to 13.7%.

Despite the bad news, the Korean tech giant remains China’s top smartphone vendor, but if the decline continues into 2015, the company will probably have to renounce the number one position.

However, when reading this report, one thing must be taken into consideration and that is the fact that in January 2014 some 356.2 million smartphones had been sold in China, while in October figures descended to 307 million. So the Chinese smartphone market was also going through a little bit of a slouch.

Chinese customers have a lot of attractive alternatives

Samsung is up against fierce competition on the Chinese market, with companies like Lenovo, Apple, Huawei, Coopad and Xiaomi offering customers worthy alternatives.

An unnamed industry source explained that Samsung’s downfall in the Chinese market might be attributed to the company’s failure to adapt to the ever-changing expectation of the fluid Chinese market.