Is it a case of reaching saturation point or the global economy uncertainty is affecting the fastest expanding hardware in human history. Gartner a leading research firm has reported that smartphone growth rate this quarter has been the slowest since 2008. Consumers picked up 403 million units a 9.7% increase over the same period of 2014. For the whole of 2015 smartphone sales reached 1.4 billion units, an increase of 14.4 percent compared to previous year.
Although Samsung was the No.1 vendor, all’s not good at SammyVille, the company faces challenges from strong competition from the likes of China and Apple. “For Samsung to stop falling sales of premium smartphones, it needs to introduce new flagship smartphones that can compete with iPhones and stop the churn to iOS devices,” said Mr. Gupta.
In stark comparison, with an increase in sales of 53% in the fourth quarter of 2015, Huawei achieved the best performance year over year. The company increased brand visibility overseas, and its decision to sell almost only smartphones notched 104 million units in sales.
For total sales of smartphones, Samsung maintained the No. 1 position, but its market share declined by 2.2 percentage points. Apple sold 225.9 million iPhones, to achieve a market share of almost 16 percent.
What changed?
“Low-cost smartphones in emerging markets, and strong demand for premium smartphones, continued to be the driving factors,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. “An aggressive pricing from local and Chinese brands in the midrange and entry-level segments of emerging markets led to consumers upgrading more quickly to affordable smartphones.”
Mr. Gupta said that 85 percent of users in the emerging Asia/Pacific market are replacing their current midrange phone with the same category of phone. In addition, currency devaluations against the U.S. dollar in many emerging markets are putting further margin pressure on many vendors that import devices. Current market conditions are prompting some vendors to consider setting up manufacturing operations in India and Indonesia to avoid being hit by future unfavorable currency devaluations and high import taxes.
In the fourth quarter of 2015, Samsung and Huawei were the only two top-five smartphone vendors to increase their sales to end users
. Apple suffered its first decline in sales of smartphones — iPhone sales were down 4.4 percent.
