Smartphone sales to new users 'have peaked'
It's an upgrade business from here on
The smartphone market will establish its maturity this year: 2012 will be the last time the shipment of handsets to new users grows.
According to figures posted by market watcher NPD DisplaySearch, smartphone shipments have been dominated by upgrade sales - handsets bought by people who already own a smartphone - but until now shipments of devices to buyers new to the category have risen year on year.
No longer. Such shipments will fall in 2013, hold broadly steady for the following two years, and then drop to around only seven per cent of smartphone shipments worldwide.
In 2016, then, some 1100m smartphones will be shipped by manufacturers like Apple and Samsung, but only 76m or so will go to folk who've never owned a smartphone before, DisplaySearch's forecast data show. The rest will be replacement units.
DisplaySearch originally forecast new smartphone sales would result in 220-230m shipments in 2012. Now it believes only 177m new smartphones will be sold. Some 390m upgrade units will take the year's shipments total to 567m, the company reckons. ®
COMMENTS
If I ruled the world every day would be the first day of spring and..................
..............on the second day all the lying snakeoil salesmen analysts would be lined up against a wall and shot. I am so piss tired of reading the largely totally useless and usually wholly inaccurate spewing of this bunch of overpaid crystal ball fiddlers that I do not know where to begin to express my feelings on the subject. <rant over>
Duh
* Smartphones have been dominating the shelves about ~2 years now.
* The average user willl change his phone every 2 - 3 years .
* Therefore anyone that bought a phone in the last 2 years probably already has a smartphone.
And since this represents the majority we can reach the conclusion that sales have peaked.
What is that these analysts are really paid for, is it just wonderfull Powerpoint presentations or aesthetically pleasing brochures ?
Why do we never see these analysts producing anything unexpected every once in a while. ( Or is it that ElReg only reports on the "stating the obvious" analyses).
Or are these "facts" only brought out in order to influence market shares held by the Analysts.
Re: "New customers" Careful, if you display too much of that kind of intelligence and common.......
...........sense your chances of achieving a lucrative career as an analyst will be zero - those companies do not appear to have much time for employing people who show any signs of joined thinking.
New customers
Every time the price comes down the number of people who can afford a smartphone goes up. Prices have a ways to go yet, therefore there remain a large number of people who haven't get got a smartphone who will.
re:If I ruled the world every day would be the first day of spring and.
Well, Vive to that and an eclair for both of us !
in 2016, I predict that console sales will also stagnate, and new consoles will not sell as well as in 1990 proportionally to the number of people that played console games, or heard about them whilst playing badmington. This is based on a stringent analysis methodology named "wild stab in the dark", which is incidently what some of these analysts are going to get one day if they don't start being more helpful.
Sorry plagariarism there, but I am only able to re-use existing data, not to create anew.
