The worst year of the smartphone market in history: world supplies fell by 4%

In 2018, world supplies of smartphones fell by 4.1%, and buyers received 1.4 billion devices, the IDC report said. This is the worst year of the smartphone market in the history of observations.

Read more. According to the vice president of the mobile department of IDC Ryan Reit, chaos is happening on the smartphone market. With the exception of dynamically developing markets of India, Indonesia, Korea and Vietnam, nothing positive happens.

• In the IV quarter, 375.4 million devices were shipped. This is 4.9% less than in the same period of last year.
• Sales of smartphones are already falling a fifth quarter in a row.
• The key market remains China, which accounts for 30% of the purchases of smartphones. In 2018, the demand in it fell by 10%.
• In addition, consolidation is in the Chinese market. In 2017, four leading Chinese brands - Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi - occupied 66% of the country's market, in 2018 their total share increased to 78%.
• A similar process is also visible in the world market: the five largest companies have increased their share from 63 to 69%.

TOP-5 manufacturers of smartphones and their market share, IDC diagram

Context

Sales were affected by several factors:

• lengthening the cycle of replacing the device;
• saturation of many large markets;
• political and economic instability;
• user dissatisfaction with the continuing increase in prices.

Alexander Ambzin