The smartphone market isn’t what it used to be as according to a recent IDC report, worldwide smartphone growth has slowed down rather considerably during the first quarter of 2016.
Based on the statistics, a total of 334.9 million smartphones were shipped by vendors worldwide in the first quarter of 2016, which is a slight increase when compared to 2015’s first quarter number of 334.3 million units. While there is an increase in units shipped, IDC notes that the smartphone market is currently experiencing its smallest year-over-year growth on record.
IDC’s report further shows that both sales of Apple and Samsung smartphones have declined, with Apple suffering a 16.3% reduction in its shipment volumes. Also interesting to note is that Lenovo and Xiaomi has been booted out of the top five smartphone vendors list, with OPPO and vivo coming in at fourth and fifth place respectively. Huawei remains the best performing China-based smartphone vendor at third place as the company managed a 58.4% growth in the first quarter of 2016.
As for why the smartphone market has slowed down considerably, IDC attributes this lack of growth to the strong smartphone saturation in developed markets. Furthermore, IDC believes that the maturing China market means that the demand for smartphones has slowed down dramatically. Only time will tell if the slowdown in growth means that the smartphone market will soon be undergoing stagnation.
Source: IDC
