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472039-top iphone x

For xiii years, smartphones have been a massive success story. Yr later on twelvemonth, we've seen companies rolling out new products at a diversity of price points and market positions. From 2004 to Q3 2017, smartphone sales grew year-on-twelvemonth, even through the Slap-up Recession. Q4 2017 put at least a temporary end to that tendency.

Gartner reports smartphone sales savage v.eight pct in Q4 2017 compared with Q4 2016. It'southward tempting to write this off every bit ordinary variance, but when the market has shown no such variation in the by 51 quarters, it'south harder to mitt-wave the figure. It'southward especially more difficult considering, in theory, we should still be seeing robust growth given that there are huge untapped markets for devices across Bharat and Red china. Here'due south Gartner'south explanation, per research manager Anshul Gupta:

Two principal factors led to the fall in the 4th quarter of 2017. Commencement, upgrades from feature phones to smartphones take slowed downward due to a lack of quality "ultra-low-cost" smartphones and users preferring to buy quality feature phones. Second, replacement smartphone users are choosing quality models and keeping them longer, lengthening the replacement cycle of smartphones. Moreover, while need for high quality, 4G connectivity and improve camera features remained stiff, loftier expectations and few incremental benefits during replacement weakened smartphone sales.

That's problematic for telephone vendors, but not particularly surprising. Smartphone benchmark performance continues to ascension yr after year, but newer phones have more than problems with throttling than older models did, and often can't maintain their tiptop frequencies for very long.

Feature introductions have slowed because it'south much harder to detect improvements in a 4-5W handset that keeps getting thinner while users demand better battery life. In short, the smartphone manufacture may accept just slammed into the same issues that have kept the PC market from growing very much. FaceTime and integrated digital administration aren't equally universally appealing as 1.5-2x operation gains, faster storage, or a dramatic bound in screen resolution.

SmartphoneDecline

Apple tree sold five percentage fewer smartphones in Q4 compared with the previous twelvemonth. Samsung saw a smaller Q4 decline. Huawei and Xiaomi were the big winners, particularly Xiaomi, which nearly doubled its market share from the same period in 2016.

Smartphone sales still rose on the full year, upwardly 2 percent, but that's a tiny gain compared with what nosotros used to see. Investors and analysts will be watching to see if the Q4 2017 drop becomes a trend or if the market stabilizes. I imagine at that place's a flake of schadenfreude from the PC market, given that manufacturers in that infinite take been struggling with exactly the same problem — how do yous build features compelling enough to drive upgrade cycles when raw performance has largely stalled out?