It seems as though smartphones couldn’t possibly become an even bigger deal, but the numbers don’t lie: A report from IDC
shows smartphone shipments grew by more than 28% year-over-year in the
first quarter of 2014. In the first thee months of the year, global
smartphone shipments totaled 281.5 million, up from 218.8 million last
year.
How much room is there to grow? Well, the entire phone market
(including both smartphones and dumbphones) shipped 448.6 million phones
over the quarter, almost the same number of phones shipped last year.
Because smartphone shipments grew and total phone shipments stayed
relatively flat, we can safely infer that the “convert all those
dumbphones to smartphones” transition is continuing on pace. Smartphones
were almost 63% of all phone shipments last quarter, while they were
about 51% of all phones a year ago.
Winners and Losers
IDC breaks down the top five smartphone vendors, from which we can spot some trends
Samsung:
Samsung shipped 85 million smartphones, about 22% more than last year.
But the market grew 28%, so its actual market share dipped a little from
about 32% to roughly 30%. The company is still dominant, and these
small changes in market share aren’t going to change that any time soon.
Apple: Apple shipped almost 17% more smartphones than the first quarter of last year (43.7 million), shrinking its
market share by a couple percentage points (down to 15.5% from
17.1%). Most of the conversions from dumbphones to smartphones—where all
the big growth is—happen at price points where Apple does not compete.
Apple shipped about half as many smartphones as Samsung so far this
year.
Huawei: Shipments jumped from 9.3 to 13.7
million units. That’s big growth, but still puts the Chinese company in a
distant third place with market share of less than 5%.
Lenovo:
From 7.9 to 12.9 million units shipped is huge growth for Lenovo, and
puts them just behind Huawei. Lenovo's smartphone business is growing
quickly, but they face challenges in high-margin Western markets.
LG:
LG’s growth was milder than Lenovo or Huawei, going from 10.3 to 12.3
million smartphones shipped. So it lost a little market share, but it’s
still hanging tough just behind Lenovo.
Others:
The IDC report lumps everyone else into a big “others” category that
accounts for almost half of all smartphone shipments (47.9% - almost
215M units). We don’t know how big of a chunk of that is taken up by
HTC, Motorola, Oppo, Sony, or Nokia.
It looks like almost everyone
is shipping more phones at the start of this year than they did last
year. The vendors are locked in a race to convert the entire mobile
phone market to smartphones, and it’s working. Smartphone shipments and
market share are just one part of the picture, though: the IDC report
doesn’t cover financials at all.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق