Argus Insights: Smartphone demand is falling
The smartphone market may be one of the largest today, but if we believe a new survey by the well-known Argus Insights, it seems to have reached its peak as consumers are not as attracted as they used to be by the new devices that are being released.
Want an example? Samsung. Its research claims that the relatively low sales of the company's new flagships, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, prove that smartphones have ceased to tempt people and the industry has come very close to saturation point. At the same time, the research emphasizes that the gradual upgrades of smartphone hardware have ceased to excite those who already have a smartphone device, as a result of which they are not so interested in buying a new one:
Consumers are losing interest in buying smartphones, and this year's Samsung flagships have failed to reverse that trend. New devices are typically a vague improvement over older ones, with better cameras, more memory, etc., but these small improvements fail to create a need for consumers to buy new devices immediately.
The summer of 2014 saw a huge surge in smartphone demand, and now it takes something really interesting to get these consumers to upgrade their smartphones earlier than they planned. Samsung managed to regain some market share in the US with the launch of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge in April 2015, but even those devices failed to drive demand.
And while the low sales of Samsung devices indicate a decline in demand for the company's, they do not effectively represent the entire industry, as Apple is still enjoying strong growth, perhaps due to the migration of Samsung device owners to Apple.
Samsung's accelerated launch of the Note 5 may be an indication of this trend. This view is supported by Argus data, which shows consumer interest in Apple devices increasing while Samsung devices are decreasing:
Of course, the research company Argus Insights does not stop there and cites other information to support its argument:
According to the graph above, demand for smartphones at the beginning of the year was doubling month by month, but from there on we see a huge drop over the following months, to the point of having a decrease of 8 percentage points from May to June.
All industries face decline at some point, and as the smartphone industry has seen tremendous growth in recent years, Argus Insights' predictions may come true at some point, as device upgrades will become increasingly monotonous, both in terms of hardware and software.
Of course, this moment may be late, as smartphone penetration is only around 30% worldwide, with Samsung and Apple still looking for opportunities to reach the limit of their capabilities.
source: myphone.gr
