Smartphone shipments plummet in Q1 as users, er, lock down their spending Early forecasts of the Q1 smartphone sector made for grim reading, with appetite expected to be severely suppressed thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequent analysis from Canalys shows those forecasts were bang-on, with worldwide shipments into the channel falling by 13 per cent year-on-year, to just over 272 million units …
Or, everybody knows that 5G is coming but currently the phones are overpriced and the chipsets a bit crap. Those of us who got caught out with 1st generation 4G won't be fooled again.
Yes sales down due to CV, trade wars and so on, but 5G not nearly a good enough reason to ignore those factors.
The 10-15 people in my immediate/close family wouldn't have a clue what 5G is or what came before it; two of them I've shown how to use WhatsApp to in the last month so they can send photos back and forth. My family can't be that dissimilar to everyone elses? I work in the tech field and am into year 25 of owning a mobile, and I've no idea without looking what the max speed is of 4G vs 5G. All I know is, I can hotspot my phone to my laptop when needed, I can HDMI or mirror it to hotel TV's, and I can watch Netflix/YouTube unhindered. That's on top of the usual phone calls and emails.
Point being, I think you overestimate the draw of 5G?
I suspect phone sales are going to be down for some time to come due to the inevitable recession which is looming. Without as much spare cash people will keep hold of their handsets for longer and replace them when they break or are no longer unsupported, rather than because the phone manufacturers have released new shiny shiny with 6 cameras for marginally better looking photos.
I genuinely don't think many have thought that far ahead from what I hear from people I speak to and the shite I consume on Facebook. A majority are still happy to be at home and want more of it, mention money, it doesn't seem to have registered it'll all need clawing back.
At least in my pool of contacts, I think the reason is simply phones have reached the peak of what they can offer. People can do everything they need to, and they can do it SIM-free. My current phone from EE is unlimited minutes/text/data for £28 a month (ex-VAT). Another is about £14 for unlimited minutes/texts and about 20GB of data. A phone that does everything Joe Public wants to do is on eBay for less than a hundred quid. Gone are the days people are willing to sign up for 3yrs and pay £60 a month.
At least in my pool of contacts, I think the reason is simply phones have reached the peak of what they can offer.
A phone is like a Swiss Army pen knife - lots of tools but all pretty rubbish because of space limitations. e.g. You are stuck with a tiny 4 mm lens with a 4 mm focal length, and no amount of fancy electronics can fix that. Ditto antennas, user interfaces, batteries, speakers, buttons, and so on.
So phone sales have dropped because of the anticipated economic downfall - so that suggests that the majority of phone sales are to people who don't have a lot of money and are busy trying to make sure that they can eat and feed their kids too. If it was the wealthy folk buying most of the phones then we would probably not have seen a downfall of this level, maybe just a dip.
If it was the wealthy folk buying most of the phones then we would probably not have seen a downfall of this level, maybe just a dip.
I expect many high end phones are bought as status items. No point buying something flashy that will become passe within a few months if there is no-one you can flash it to.
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