Analyst calls it: This is the 'biggest fall ever in the history of the worldwide smartphone market'
- Reference: 1584991152
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/23/biggest_fall_smartphones/
- Source link:
Units fell from 99.2 million to 61.8 million due - in no small way - to the collapse of demand, particularly in Asia, as "many consumers were unable or unwilling to visit retail stores and buy new devices". Factory closures also served to disrupt the supply chain.
There's roughly 600 brands left making smartphone models worldwide. We expect to see that tip down in the next year or so...
Strategy Analytics told us it expects global handset shipments to remain weak for the whole of March too. That sounds like an understatement, given that March has seen many countries and cities around the world declare varying degrees of lockdown.
EMEA analyst Neil Mawston told The Reg : "For March the decline will probably be roughly the same globally; the West is turning down but China and South Korea and other places are turning up and recovering. Some factories are still not fully up to speed in Asia or elsewhere so the supply of some models is still a bit uncertain."
There'll be fewer firms making smartphones..
What is likely to happen if the lockdowns are prolonged? "There's roughly 600 brands left making smartphone models worldwide. We expect to see that tip down in the next year or so," said Mawston. "Some will exit the market, some will stop altogether, others will merge. Some will get taken over in distress. We expect to see the supply side change dramatically over the next year or so."
Who is best placed to survive? "Somebody like Apple with huge buckets of cash will be able to last for years with low sales, others that have been making heavy losses in recent years, like Lenovo, Motorola or Sony, will struggle to last as long," said Mawston.
"Our working assumption is that there's about a three-month curve on it. If you look at China for example, January weakened, February collapsed, and March recovered slightly. If the West follows that, then March is terrible, April is the slowdown and May is the recovery. That's our current working thesis. But that depends how well these lockdowns go."
A [1]report from retail research company GFK has looked at the impact of lockdown in China so far this year, describing the impact on retail sales (not just in smartphones) as "short, sharp and devastating", though it added that in China "the peak has passed, and consumption is gradually recovering". The issue was threefold. "Stores were closed, the supply chain faltered, and consumers postponed purchases as their income suffered."
This is a pattern we can expect to repeat in the west, with online sales partially compensating for lost revenue from physical stores – though sales of certain items have boomed. GFK reports that in the UK for the second week of March ( [2]as home working surged ), sales of PC monitors were up 132 per cent. El Reg noted this dynamic on [3]notebooks too .
The overall picture is grim, though. "We're living through a period where market dynamics are almost impossible to predict," said GFK. "We will no doubt look back at this and change how we handle pandemics in the future, but for now, we must all live day to day, and take decisions based on the best available information." ®
[1] https://insights.gfk.com/how-to-navigate-external-shocks-like-covid-19-and-come-out-on-top
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/20/home_working_laptops_monitors_wlans_selling_fast/
[3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/20/home_working_laptops_monitors_wlans_selling_fast/
tedious self hate again
Better pom explorers than anyone else.
"Did anyone pay the analysts for this work?"
I sincerely hope not because they are merely stating the bleedin' obvious given the current situation.
It's a fair bet nothing much will be happening anywhere before the end of April and then we will all be trying to figure out how to pay the bills. That is to say all of them from those whose income has suffered due to layoffs up to those who have printed Trillions of dollars to pay for not reacting to a pandemic probably until it's too late.
April is optimistic, maybe the pandemic will be under control by then but I suspect the World economy won't be.
5G Fail
All the mobile marketing departments told us we need 5G now. 5G is "here" but not working yet. mmWave is a failure and phones have NR band compatibility issues. I know of only one phone that is fully compatible with my carrier's low/mid bands but it won't work if I travel out of North America. It's not inspiring.
Apple cart upset?
First Apple limits the amount of phones one can buy at a time, then flops back? Someone forgot to count the phones in Tim's garage?
Re: Apple cart upset?
iPhones are apparently the opposite of milk... I could previously buy more than two of those, but no longer.
and in breaking news
water is wet. {S} Almost all Android phones are boring clones of each other with mostly same irritations and varying only in insufficiencies of battery, repairability, unpatched vulnerabilities and screen visibility. What else would one expect when market saturates ? Adding the current newish bug discouraging consumerism by applying basic poverty what else could be expected ? Once people are back at work I do forecast a leap in battery sales and a small increase because the bored idle will have used their phones to point of reasonable replacement.
As for Apple, I suspect mostly the same.
Did anyone pay the analysts for this work? Because I'm pretty sure the upcoming down turn in the global economy is more predictable than things go badly for the natives when British explorers turned up.