Analysts have been warning about smartphone market saturation for a while now, and it's certainly slowed down the growth of the market in the past few years. It's never caused a major decline in sales, however, but Q1 in 2019 might have just started that trend.
It's had some interesting impacts on manufacturers, too.
Samsung gained market share this quarter, climbing from 23% last year to 29% this year, narrowing Apple's lead of around 40% market share. They also managed to sell 2 million units each of the Galaxy S10e and Galaxy S10+, with an undisclosed amount of regular Galaxy S10 units in their mix. That really makes it sound like it's less popular than its budget-friendly sibling and its bigger, but more expensive, variant.
In a time where phones keep getting more and more expensive, seeing the Galaxy S10e shine makes a ton of sense. It's still not cheap at $750, but it looks great next to $1000+ models.
The Galaxy S10+, however, is one of those $1000+ models. My guess is that Samsung's early pre-order/trade-in deals helped skew those numbers towards the most expensive models, or maybe people really don't care about phone pricing and we're just overblowing everything.
Total shipments of smartphones in North America came in at just 36.4 million phones, which is the lowest it's been in five years.
It's also down from 44.4 million in Q1 2018, which is almost a 20% drop. According to the analysis, the decline can be contributed to a weaker-than-usual quarter from Apple and ZTE being totally absent from the market, although Apple still managed to cling to 40% of all phones sold with 14.6 million iPhone units.
Any of these numbers seem surprising to you?
source: Canalys
