Holding off on upgrading your smartphone? You're not the only one.
Garner on Thursday said that global smartphone sales "stalled" in the fourth quarter of 2018 as Apple logged its "worst quarterly decline since the first quarter of 2016." Collectively, smartphone vendors sold 408.4 million handsets during the period, a mere 0.1 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2017, the research firm said.
"Demand for entry-level and midprice smartphones remained strong across markets, but demand for high-end smartphones continued to slow in the fourth quarter of 2018," Gartner Senior Research Director Anshul Gupta said in a statement. "Slowing incremental innovation at the high end, coupled with price increases, deterred replacement decisions for high-end smartphones. This led to a flat-growth market in the fourth quarter of 2018."
Samsung lead the market, selling 70.7 million smartphones during the quarter, a 4.4 percent year-over-year drop, Gartner said. Apple came in second place, peddling 64.5 million iPhones – 11.8 percent less than it sold during the same period a year earlier.
"This double-digit decline made Apple experience the biggest decline in growth for the quarter among the top five global smartphone vendors," Gartner noted. iPhone demand weakened in "most regions" with the exception of North America and the mature Asia/Pacific market. Apple experienced its largest decline in Greater China.
"Apple has to deal not only with buyers delaying upgrades as they wait for more innovative smartphones, but it also continues to face compelling high-price and midprice smartphone alternatives from Chinese vendors," Gupta said. "Both these challenges limit Apple's unit sales growth prospects."
Meanwhile, Gartner called 2018 "the year of Huawei." The Chinese smartphone maker, whose phones are essentially illegal in the US, came in third place for the quarter, selling 60.4 million units, a 37.6 percent year-over-year increase. Chinese smartphone brands Oppo and Xiaomi came in fourth and fifth, respectively.
In 2018 as a whole, smartphone makers collectively sold 1.6 billion handsets, a 1.2 percent year-over-year increase, Gartner said. In North America, the mature Asia/Pacific market, and Greater China, however, smartphone sales declined last year.
"In mature markets, demand for smartphones largely relies on the appeal of flagship smartphones from the top three brands — Samsung, Apple and Huawei — and two of them recorded declines in 2018," Gupta said.
