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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The global smartphone market is shrinking for the first time as choosey buyers in emerging markets hang on to their mobiles for longer.
In Gartner's Q4 sales stats, Samsung maintained a narrow lead in global volume shipments of smartphones – but every major (top five) vendor outside of those based in China saw unit shipments slip.
Some 407.84 million handsets found a new home in the quarter, equating to a 5.6 per cent slide or 24.29 million fewer phones sold than the prior year.
Several major factors caused the market shrinkage, said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. "First, upgrades from feature phones to smartphones have slowed right down due to a lack of quality 'ultra-low-cost' smartphones and users preferring to buy quality feature phones.
"Second, replacement smartphone users are choosing quality models and keeping them longer, lengthening the replacement cycle of smartphones. Moreover, while demand for high quality, 4G connectivity and better camera features remained strong, high expectations and few incremental benefits during replacement weakened smartphone sales," Gupta added.
This is a characteristic of the emerging markets, where all the action is – not mature markets like the UK or USA.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @08:18AM (1 child)
I think it's far more likely by now that everyone who was going to upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone has done so already. People who only have a feature phone at this point have it because they WANT a feature phone or are in a situation where all they can get is a feature phone. I can think of many reasons to want a feature phone over a smartphone:
1. Low cost; easy to replace if it gets damaged or destroyed.
2. Very long battery life and fast to recharge from ANY USB charger.
3. Ease of use. (Some people don't want the distraction/confusion of all the functions of a touch screen computer when all they want to do is place and receive calls.)
4. Usually much more durable without adding a potentially bulky case.
5. No need for a screen protector that requires a low-class clean room if you don't want a bunch of dust forever trapped between it and the screen.
I also wonder how many people aren't buying new phones because they don't want some flawed piece of shit with a sealed-in non-replaceable battery. I for one won't pay good money for something I know will become absolutely useless in about 18 months only because some fucktard MBA decided either form was more important than function (FUCK YOU iTARDS! YOU BRAINDEAD MOTHERFUCKERS ARE HALF THE REASON SEALED-IN BATTERIES ARE A THING! *cough*) or they thought they could make more money by planned obsolescence.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 26 2018, @06:53PM
As explained in TFS, the bulk of growth is in emerging markets.
At the same time, premium phones keep getting much more expensive, without adding significant usage improvements.
100 million smartphones per month is pretty much where you have to start your exponential slowdown to plateau, because that's 2.4B smartphones per two years, and you're starting to run out of people who can afford these gadgets costing over a month of their income, let alone the data plans that would make them usable.
Add a minor contribution of the US government making a mess all over the world (directly, indirectly, or just by raising anger level all around), compared to the previous Q4, and all this means that a slowdown in smartphone buys is not surprising at all.