The smartphone market is going through hard times. Many manufacturers complain about falling sales, and in order to increase them, they constantly offer more and more new functions or relatively inexpensive models. In general, everyone fights for the buyer as best he can, but the buyers themselves are in no hurry to part with their money and buy new smartphones. All this for the second quarter in a row leads to a drop in sales of mobile devices. This time, we still have statistics only for the United States, but with some deviations and assumptions, it can be applied to the rest of the world. There shouldn't be a big deviation in large markets, but the statistics are very interesting.
They cannot be stopped … Smartphone sales continue to fall.
How the coronavirus affected phone sales
Of course, first of all, the COVID-19 pandemic had the greatest impact on smartphone sales, which not only significantly damaged the global economy, but also affected each specific potential buyer.
The most innocuous influence is that people could not go shopping and buy new smartphones for a long time. Of course, you can buy everything online, but many still prefer the classic way with a trip to the store. In addition, many of those who buy over the Internet still want to first personally touch what they are interested in, and for this they need a showroom or store. This does not apply to fans of the brand, especially Apple. They roughly know what they will get in the new generation, and are ready to buy “without looking”.
The situation is much more serious with the “dark side of the pandemic”. I mean the case when people just simply lost their jobs due to the closure of many small businesses. They could not cope with falling demand and the forced lockdown of workers at home. But large companies also suffered from this, for example, automakers, which cut workers by entire factories.
Smartphone sales statistics
We already wrote about how smartphone sales suffered in the last quarter, and how Xiaomi was the only company whose sales did not fall. This could be explained by the transition to her camp of many fans Huawei, who were suddenly left without Google.
This time, Samsung suffered the least, at least in the US market. But the Chinese manufacturers suffered the most. The easiest way to explain this is the release of a rather successful model Samsung Galaxy A51, which is not very expensive, but at the same time offers good features and the very “user experience”.
It's much nicer when you can come and touch the phone before buying. Now this is difficult.
However, the US market has some minor peculiarities – first of all, it has a bright offline focus. And also postpaid smartphones are very popular there, which are closely related to the operator's tariff. In this case, buying a smartphone, a person chooses a certain tariff for 1-2 years and gets it for free or with a serious discount. This slightly shifts the sales statistics towards expensive devices (after all, you don't have to pay right away), but not so much that the data is considered completely inappropriate to the world.
But it was in the American market that the closure of retail stores affected more than the rest of the world. But then again, this is not enough to suggest that sales in the US fell 25%, while in the rest of the world they did not fall at all.
If you look at the sales statistics by quarters, then there is a drop, but it is interesting that if you compare June 2020 and June 2019, then in general there is even an increase. It can be explained by the so-called deferred demand. This is when people wait for a long time, accumulate needs, and then shops open and they immediately run to buy what they need. That is, roughly speaking, under normal conditions such a number of sales would have been in three months, and in the prevailing conditions – in one.
Which smartphones sell the worst
Returning to the manufacturers, according to the above report, ZTE suffered the most (a drop of 68%), Motorola (a drop of 62%) and OnePlus (a drop of 60%). This can be explained by the dubious quality of ZTE devices and Motorola and high prices for this year's new items from OnePlus.
This is the decline shown by the largest manufacturers.
They lost significantly less Apple (23%) and LG (35%), and very little compared to other Samsung (10%) and Alcatel (11%) . With Alcatel, however, it turned out quite unexpectedly, but the company was saved by inexpensive models.
The report also notes that the new generation Samsung Galaxy S20 is selling 38% less than the Galaxy S10 last year. Data taken from the first 4 months of sales. But Apple, on the contrary, very successfully issued iPhone SE and thus did not lose as much as it could if it continued to trade exceptionally expensive models. It was mainly bought by its owners iPhone 6S, but about a quarter iPhone SE were sold to those who previously used Android – smartphones.
Remember the times when you could go to the salon like that and see everything? Now this will not work. At least in law-abiding salons and shops.
Of course, the market will gradually recover, but the pandemic became a serious reboot for it and led to the fact that people just wondered if they needed an expensive phone. Moreover, nothing fundamentally new appears, they just become a little more powerful. Manufacturers also come up with artificial restrictions on functions that are programmatically blocked on older devices and are presented as a killer feature in new ones.
Of course, there are innovations, like a drive-out camera, a gimbal camera or an ultra-fast charging, but in general it's still the same device. Maybe something will change when foldable smartphones become cheaper and the screen can bend without leaving a crease? It may very well be.