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August 03, 2015

Second Quarter 2015 Shows Worst Smartphone Growth in Six Years

Depending on which analysts’ report you read, smartphone shipments for this year’s second quarter came in between 338 and 435 million units. These figures represent a weaker growth rate in the U.S. and China of about 15 or 16 percent.

Samsung once again took the number one spot reaching a total of 73.2 million smartphones shipped for the quarter. Apple retained its second place slot with a shipment of 47.5 million units. This year, Huawei claimed the number three slot by shipping over 30 million units in the second quarter.

According to Juniper Research, "The global smartphone market continued to mature this quarter and the gap between winners and losers grew larger. While the launch of the P8 helped Huawei to nearly 50 percent year-over-year growth, Xiaomi, its nearest rival, shipped 20.5 million, representing an increase of a third compared to this time last year. Juniper notes that the key difference between Huawei and Xiaomi is that Huawei is currently making an effort to expand beyond Asia. Xiaomi is not, leaving it vulnerable to the slowing of the Chinese market, which is also affecting ZTE."

Analysts have been predicting that the smartphone market will soon reach a saturation point. Until now China and the U.S. have been the largest markets with India quickly gaining, as telecoms are finding ways to deliver access to remote regions of the country.

Unfortunately, the numbers for this quarter show that it was the smartphone industry's slowest growth rate for six years. Possibly, due to a lead up to Windows 10 and somewhat uncharacteristically, Microsoft has seen a steady increase of 12 percent in smartphone shipments, marking a total of 8.4 million units shipped.

In a statement, Linda Sui, Strategy Analytics analyst said, "Smartphone growth is slowing due to increasing penetration maturity in major markets of the U.S., Europe and China. Smartphones will need a design transformation to revitalize growth in the future, such as foldable or rollable displays."

Will market saturation incite smartphone manufacturers to become more creative and create devices that are outside the box? While it is true that a lot of emerging countries are constantly expanding the deployment of their networks, users mostly rely on cheaper feature phones instead of smartphones. Does this mean that we have actually seen the long, talked-about saturation point for smartphones?




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino


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