The Factors That Affect on the Purchase Intention of Smartphone Among Year 3 Engineering Entrepreneurship Students

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on social media, search information through internet, reminding themselves for

important days, use Global Positioning System (GPS) function and so on.

The research conducted is to explore the factors that affect on purchasing

intention of smartphone among a study of PPIPT year 3 Engineering Entrepreneurship

students, University Malaysia Perlis. This chapter provides an overview of the

research. This study will begin with the introduction, history, problem statement,

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following by research objective, research questions, and definition of terms,

significance of the study and scope of study.

1.1.1 History of Smartphone

In 1973, Motorola researcher Martin Cooper invented the world’s first mobile

phone, now has 40 years of history, until 1985, the first mobile phone was sold to the

market. In the past, the mobile phone can only make calls, but now the mobile phone

has been improved to be able to listen to music, play games, access to the internet and

the size is gradually smaller. Mobile phone evolved from 1G to 4G, and now we call

it as smartphone.

Type Figure Features Year

1G

(Analogue

cellular)

Basic voice service

using analog prorocols.

1981

2G

(Digital

cellular)

Designed primarily for

boice using the digital

standards.

1992

3G

(Mobile

broadband)

First mobile broadband

utilizing IP protocols.

2001

3

4G

(Native IP

networks)

True mobile broadband

on a unified standard

(LTE).

2010

5G ‘Tactile Internet’ with

service-aware devices

and fiber-like speeds

2020(?)

1.2 Problem Statement

As the rapid development of technology, so the smartphone companies

continue to introduce new innovations produce to increase sales, but not all of the

products are in satisfied with consumer demand. If the smartphone companies cannot

grasp the needs of consumers, they are likely to waste a huge of research and

development costs, at the same time also unable to obtain the favour of consumers, it

will soon be eliminated in the market.

As technology changes rapidly, so this creates difficulties in the study,

analysis and interpret young adults purchase intention. According to Mohd Azam

Osman et al (2012), agreed that Smartphone technology is changing peoples’

behaviors especially young adults. Most of the smartphone users is young adults, so

often the smartphone companies will launch the new models of smartphone to market

from time to time in order to meet their needs and also gain the competitive advantage

in the market.

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Due to the large entry of mobile phone companies, many Smartphone brand

has introduced to the market in Malaysia, such as Apple, Samsung, Oppo, Vivo,

Huawei, Xiaomi, HTC, Sony and so on. When consumers making the purchase

decision, they will more likely to purchase well-known brand products with a positive

brand image. At the same time, consumers are price sensitive and they always want to

get the best quality goods at the lowest price, so companies must strive to improve the

quality of their products and maintain at the lowest price.

According to the smartphone usage statistic made by Anson (2012), younger

generation can adopt to new technology device or new innovation product faster than

the old generation and it show that the most largest market of the smartphone users

are the younger generation. So that, if the smartphone companies want to increase the

demand of smartphone, the first step is to identify factor that will affect the purchase

intention of young adults to buy smartphone.

Although many researchers and studies have done a lot of hypothesis research and

research on consumer purchase intentions of smartphone, but there is still room for

improvement. This study is focus on the young adults purchase intention of

smartphone, and in order to facilitate access to data, we choose PPIPT year 3

Engineering Entrepreneurship students to obtain data. Therefore, this research is to

investigate whether product feature, brand image and price could affect the

purchasing