A historic decline in the smartphone sales in Q4 2017 compared with 2016.
Research company Gartner published a report about the worldwide smartphone sales in Q4 and the whole 2017. It appears that the historic 99.9% of the smartphones sold in 2017 were Android or iPhones, as the third mobile OS was discontinued by Microsoft, leaving customers without a viable third alternative. The smartphone market is now a duopoly.
Quite logically, since the market is quite saturated, the prices have reached $1000, the phones look the same, and the hardware improvements are marginal, the number of users who decide to upgrade to a new model in every two years is decreasing, consequently – the sales fell too.
Q4 2017 was a historic quarter for the market, as the sales declined for the first time ever on a year-to-year basis. 5.6% fewer phones were sold in the quarter compared with the Q4 in 2016, with both Apple and Samsung selling fewer devices in the Holiday quarter. But while Apple lost 0.4%, Samsung somehow managed to increase its market presence in 2017.
Gartner is reporting a total of 404,845,400 smartphones sold in 4Q2017, while the sales a year ago were 432,140,300. However, for the whole 2017 the market has grown slightly, from 1,495 million to 1,536 million units. Apple has a 14% of the sales (and a record high revenue), while Samsung leads with 20.9 percent.
In the operating system market, there is nothing interesting, if not counting the fact that the ‘Other OS’ section is about to disappear soon, since the non-Android/iOS smartphones declined from 11 million to just 1.4 million units for a whole year. What are you doing Microsoft?
Source: Gartner