“Vendors will look to push device financing and trade-in options across numerous developed markets as growth in these markets is expected to primarily come from replacement purchases and second devices”, IDC Research Manager Anthony Scarsella, said in a press statement.
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“With the smartphone market finally slowing to single-digit growth, maintaining momentum will depend on several factors”.
Windows 10 will not help Microsoft’s plight either said IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report looking at the full calendar year, released last week. That slowing growth is going to get even slowing through 2019, IDC predicts, due largely to lower Windows Phone sales, as well as fewer sales of phones running platforms outside Android, iOS and Windows Phone. At the 9.8% rate, 1.43 billion smartphones will ship. By comparison, the anticipated CAGR for iOS is 6.5 percent in the same period, which translates to 263.4 million iPhones being shipped and the platform accounting for a 14.1 percent market share. According to the report, the Chinese market will only post single-digit growth in the next four years, however other Asian markets such as India are expected to manage hefty year over year (YoY) increase of 50%. In 2015, IDC expects the average selling price (ASP) of Windows Phones to be $148, which is $71 lower than Android’s ASP of $219. That’s a drop compared to 2014, when it shipped almost 35 million.
By the time Microsoft really turned its attention to tablets in 2012, when it launched the Surface hybrid, people had already learned that, at least on keyboard-free devices, they didn’t need Windows.
This decline is a stark reversal from IDC’s earlier prediction that Windows Phone would grow by 34 percent in all of 2015, shipping a grand total of 46.8 million phones. It’s a strategy that has worked out well for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company.
IDC said Android is likely to remain dominant this year with a market share of 81.2 percent while Apple captures 15.8 percent of the market. As the majority of Apple’s core markets have transitioned into replacement markets, Apple’s move to get into the iPhone trade-in space is not surprising.
Reasons for the decline include one of the main markets, China, reaching saturation point and turning into a replacement market, where consumers only buy a smartphone when their current one breaks or comes to the end of its contract.
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But so far it appears to be struggling to appeal to consumers, a trend that will continue through to 2019, according to IDC, which attributes the weakness to the lack of support from handset manufacturers. He also said the company needed to focus more on whether Windows Phone handsets could run Android apps.
