Worldwide Smartphone Sales Declined Last Quarter for the First Time Ever [Chart]

Worldwide smartphone sales declined last quarter for the first time ever, according to a Gartner report.

Global sales of smartphones to end users totaled nearly 408 million units in the fourth quarter of 2017, a 5.6 percent decline over the fourth quarter of 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. This is the first year-on-year decline since Gartner started tracking the global smartphone market in 2004.

"Two main factors led to the fall in the fourth quarter of 2017," said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. "First, upgrades from feature phones to smartphones have slowed down 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 demand for high quality, 4G connectivity and better camera features remained strong, high expectations and few incremental benefits during replacement weakened smartphone sales."


Gartner notes that Samsung saw a year-on-year unit decline of 3.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017, but this did not prevent it from defending its No. 1 global smartphone vendor position against Apple.



Although, Apple's market share stabilized in Q4, iPhone sales fell 5 percent. "Apple was in a different position this quarter than it was 12 months before," said Mr. Gupta. "It had three new smartphones — the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X — yet its performance in the quarter was overshadowed by two factors. First, the later availability of the iPhone X led to slow upgrades to iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, as users waited to try the more-expensive model. Second, component shortages and manufacturing capacity constraints preceded a long delivery cycle for the iPhone X, which returned to normal by early December 2017. We expect good demand for the iPhone X to likely bring a delayed sales boost for Apple in the first quarter of 2018," added Mr. Gupta.




In operating system market share, Google's Android extended its lead over iOS capturing 85.9% of the market. Up 1.1% from a year ago.

More details in the full report linked below...

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