The coronavirus outbreak in China has severely impacted the tech industry not only in China but globally. With several major events getting cancelled, including the Mobile World Congress 2020 and production as well as supply chain getting impacted, the companies are cutting down their sales forecast.
Now, the numbers coming in from China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), which is a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), shows that the Chinese smartphone market witnessed a touch time in January this year.
As per the report, in the first month of the year, January 2020, the domestic mobile phone shipments in China sharply fell by 38.9 percent year-on-year with shipments of just 20.8 million units. In that, shipments from domestic brands fell by 42.9 percent.
However, the report shows that in the month on January, 34 new mobile phone models were launched in the market which shows year-on-year increase of 6.3 percent. Out of those models, eight were 2G phones, 18 were 4G phones and other eight were 5G devices.
The impact in the mobile phone shipments in the Chinese market has been attributed to two major reasons — Lunar New Year holiday and coronavirus outbreak. The Covid-19 outbreak has led to closure of several manufacturing plants in the country as well as some brick-and-mortar stores have also remain shut.
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Citing the effect of coronavirus outbreak, several research firms have downgraded their first-quarter outlook for China’s smartphone market. International Data Corporation (IDC) and Strategy Analytics said that the country’s smartphone shipments are likely to suffer a year-on-year drop of more than 30 percent in the first quarter of this year.
In a rare company advisory released earlier this week by Apple — the world’s most valuable tech company — said it is reducing the company’s revenue targets this quarter. Facebook has also reduced production goals for its Oculus Quest virtual reality headsets.
Additionally, all the major tech companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, have restricted employee travel to China, either banning or limiting it only to matters of critical importance.
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(Source)
