THE last few years have been quite challenging for the global smartphone industry, and 2024 doesn’t look much better. After shifting back and forth, the global demand for new devices is expected to plunge again this year, prolonging the long-awaited market recovery.
But despite the market struggling to retain the growth rates seen in 2021, the total number of smartphone shipments continues rising, pushing the ten-year figures to impressive highs.
According to data presented by AltIndex.com, global smartphone shipments hit a whopping 14 billion in the past decade.
Despite the growth in emerging markets, global smartphone sales have been hugely impacted by component shortages, inventory buildup, and longer replacement cycles, resulting in a $15 billion sales drop in three years.
In 2024, global smartphone sales are expected to generate $486 billion in revenue, down from more than $500 billion in 2021, according to Statista market projections. But despite the headwinds and setbacks, global smartphone sales still climbed to impressive highs.
IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker survey shows smartphone producers have shipped more than 14 billion units worldwide since Q1 2014. Statistics also show that 2015, 2016 and 2017 were the best years for global smartphone sales in the past decade, with an average of 1.4 billion shipments.
The following years saw much lower figures, with shipments plunging to 1.28 billion during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although 2021 brought a recovery, the negative trend continued throughout 2022 and 2023, with shipments falling by another 13 percent.
While IDC data show positive movement in the first half of 2024, with smartphone shipments rising by almost 40 million year over year to 574.8 million, demand remains challenging in many markets, and global shipment figures are still far below those seen at the market peak.
Analyzed by vendors, Samsung once again proved to be the absolute king of smartphone sales, with 2.99 billion shipped units in the past decade. Moreover, this means the South Korean tech giant outsold its biggest competitor, Apple, by a massive 743 million units, which sold 2.24 billion of its smartphones since 2014.
While Samsung is at the top of global smartphone sales, its market share has significantly dropped over the past ten years, primarily due to surging Chinese competitors Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo.
In Q2 2024, the South Korean tech giant held 18.9 percent of the global smartphone market, down from 30.7 percent in Q1 2014. Statistics show Apple’s market share remained unchanged, at 15.8 percent in Q2 2024.
Although far behind the market’s two largest players, the Chinese competitors have shown remarkable growth in the last ten years. Xiaomi hit a new milestone, with its ten-year shipments jumping over the 1-billion mark. Also, the Chinese smartphone producer is now close to Apple with a 14.8 percent market share in the second quarter of the year, three times more than a decade ago. Oppo and Vivo followed with 937 million and 528 million smartphones shipped since 2014, respectively.
Jastra Kranjec
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