The Data
Gartner published an analysis for the final quarter of 2017, the time of the year when people go on enough holiday shopping frenzies to empty stocks everywhere. Compared to 2016’s final quarter, the following year saw a decline of 5.6 percent. This is the first-ever decline in sales recorded by Gartner in the smartphone industry. This may not seem like much, but when you’re expecting hundreds of millions of sales, the losses could amount to tens of millions of dollars. At the consumer level, however, not a lot would change. Companies would simply reduce the number of smartphones they manufacture if demand falls.
Why This Is Important
Although we don’t really know what caused the decline in sales, we can safely boil it down to two different trends. By no means could we ascribe this dip to a lack of interest in smartphones, as they have become incredibly ubiquitous in modern society. However, PCs are also ubiquitous. And even so, their sales figures are not nearly at the levels they were in the late 90s and early 2000s. At some point disruptive technologies will plateau, not in popularity but in purchases. According to Gartner, two things are happening: Consumer choices for the most part in the first half of the 2010s involved a preference for new, shiny features. But consumer decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. They evolve over time. As people grew more immune to the noise that flagship manufacturers were making about the flashiness of their new phones, they began making savvier choices. Some of these people will stop buying a new phone every one or two years just to have the latest gear. This happens as soon as smartphones are viewed less as status symbols and more as tools. Although this event marked a slight drop in sales, we could expect the growth to plateau at some point in time when interest in having the most cutting-edge technology drops. On the other hand, this would also lead application developers to think more about how to make their apps more resource-friendly just like they started doing as people stopped buying brand new PCs all the time. What have your mobile phone purchases looked like recently? Do you buy more for durability or for new features? Tell us all about it in a comment!
