The latest outlook provided by the International Data Corporation (IDC) quarterly report on global smartphone shipments indicates that a decent 5.3% growth is expected for 2021, despite disruptions due to supply chain constraints and the global chip shortage. The IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker indicates that shipments will climb to 1.35 billion units, which is a 5.3% increase from last year.
The IDC report also indicates a lower than expected third quarter that has seen the global component shortage bite harder and hurt manufacturers’ projections. These challenges are not expected to improve drastically until mid-2022, thus lowering the forecasts for 2022 to 3.0% from earlier projections of 3.4%. The 2021 outlook was also downgraded to 5.3% from the initial 7.4%, according to IDC.
IDC says overall, the logistic and components shortage challenges will slowly decline, with a 3.5% five-year annual growth rate expected. This will be driven by pent-up demand, continued transition from feature phones to smartphones, as well as declining average sale prices for phones. IDC also says that the component shortage problem seriously affected 4G models and this will gravely impact vendors with a higher mix of 4G models than 5G. This, in IDC’s view, was the major reason for the downgrading of the Q3 outlook for 2021.
The fourth quarter will see a single-digit decline although this could be felt more in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan and China. Due however to the impressive half-year numbers across the regions, only China will see a flat year-on-year result, while the rest regions will record positive growth. The average price of devices by the operating system will see Android peak at $265 while iOS will finish at $950. The numbers also indicate that Apple accounts for about 43% of all smartphone revenue and a 17.1% market share.
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