At last, we begin to see the first data and statistics for the 2020 course in the mobile industry, and we attest that some of the details published are as many interesting as the best-selling phones of the year we met a couple of weeks ago, or some of the numbers of units sold that placed Samsung at the pole of the industry but falling sharply in sales globally.
Smartphone sales suffer their biggest drop
In fact, we should have taken that news seriously by reading between the lines, because the truth is that the fall of Samsung dragged the entire industry into a spiral of contraction in a sector of smartphones accustomed only to growth, which has shown once again that this growth does not exist infinitely and any industry ends up saturating sooner or later.
The smartphone market is deflating … What if it was true that infinite growth does not exist?
Thus, experts are already talking about “the biggest quarterly decline the mobile market has ever seen, at least since IDC started its data series 14 years ago” in the EMEA region, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which is also the most affected area of the planet by the crisis of a sector that is only growing in India and some other Asian market.
IDC’s future forecast between 2020 and 2024 for the mobile market
The pandemic has changed the rules, but the mobile market was already falling in sales much earlier
The words of Simon Baker, director of IDC for the EMEA region, describe a devastating second quarter of 2020 in a mobile market that perfectly depicts a long-anticipated saturation, and that has affected European markets to a greater extent, Where there was a time that smartphones almost stopped selling like chewing gum.
Nowadays the quality of the mid-range and the lack of evolution that is noticed, has made the useful life of mobile phones grow and the replacement times are longer, so it was logical that fewer and fewer mobile phones were sold until stabilizing the figure.
In any case, it should be noted that the research manager Marta Pinto confirms that the area most affected by the falls is precisely ours, that of southern Europe, and she expects the market to drop to 63 million units sold with 19,000 million in income.
And if we look to the future, it does not paint the image better for the coming quarters that we show you in the graph above, and that is that the smartphone industry was doomed to contract sooner or later to find its logical annual sales figures without that exponential growth that seemed to have no limits.
Curious is also the case of realme, which as Counterpoint shows is the brand of smartphones that has grown the fastest in the market, at least if we talk about Asian countries in these first months of 2020, since its birth last year. sheltered from OPPO.
And yes, it really is a spin-off firm written in literally lowercase letters of an OPPO that wants capital letters for itself, but that intends to compete with Xiaomi with all of the law and that is surely achieving it with wide catalogue options and prices very contained for its capabilities.
To show a button, it is that it really grew 173% year- on- year, always staying in the Top 5 in sales in the Southeast Asian markets, ranking among the first in key countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar or Cambodia.
