Smartphone Sales Predicted to Hit US$1bn This Year

It may seem a redundant statement, but Smartphones really are everywhere these days. How many people do you know who don’t own a smartphone in at least one way or another? It’s getting to be a smaller and smaller number each year. What was once a perhaps unnecessary and expensive “solution looking for a problem” is now a global phenomenon that many in the 1st world can’t live without and many in the developing world are using to advance their technology in leaps and bounds.

But just how big are smartphones, really?

Well according to a study done by accountant firm Delottie, by the end of 2013 the yearly shipping number of smartphones will be over 1 Billion. That’s 1 Billion smartphones going to customers globally every single year.

This is a development that’s been coming for a while. Earlier this year Credit Suisse predicted in Reuters that 2012’s annual sales would reach 688 million units, which was a 46% jump over 2011. A Gartner study of 2011 sales estimated that they reached 472 million units and accounted for 31% of all mobile devices sold, which in itself was a 58% step-up over 2010. The Global number of smartphone sales hit 1.8 Billion in 2011, which means by now we are well over that number if the other predictions are true.

Unsurprisingly Samsung is now the number one manufacturer of Smartphones, with an estimated global sales number of 98 million units globally in the year 2012 by the third quarter. Surprisingly, at least on the global sales market, Nokia are second place with 82 million by Q3 2012, with Apple trailing at 23.5 million sales globally.

For those of us who live in the first world smartphone era, it may be strange to see Nokia up there well above Apple, but it’s important to remember that these numbers are global sales. Nokia have a long history of making cheap, sturdy phones that will survive anything you throw at them, or indeed throw them at, which makes them popular choices for the developing world where the ability to take panoramic photos with your phone is less important than them being able to reliably make phone calls or send texts.

That’s not to say that these aren’t smartphones being sold to the developing markets, they are high performance (relatively speaking) devices with the fast processors, cameras and big screens we’re used to, they just cost less than half of the price of an iPhone, usually around $100 or even less. Nokia is one of the major manufacturers of these so called “dumbphone in a smartphone’s clothing” type phones and with estimates by Deloitte pointing to over 500m of these devices being sold in the developing world, it’s no wonder that Nokia is up there on the overall sales charts.

Much of these massive worldwide sales are being driven by countries like India and China where, for the first time, these advanced devices are within the grasp of the middle class.

What’s interesting though is that smartphones, are rarely being connected to the internet. That doesn’t mean that they are not getting used, but they’ll be performing the same actions of a traditional mobile (calls, texts etc) rather than browsing the internet or interacting with social media.

In fact it’s estimated that one in five owners of smartphones don’t ever, or very rarely, connect them to the internet.

It may seem odd, but if you have a technophobic parent or relative you’ll know that they’ll avoid adding anything to their relationship with technology that may complicate it. Couple that with stories about high prices of mobile internet and mobile data offers always being filled with jargon, it’s no wonder that despite smartphone penetration going up, the mobile data numbers are not climbing to match it.

What all this does mean, of course, is that the market for app development is only growing, at a fairly exponential rate. Any voices that are crying about how the market has stopped growing has only got to look at these numbers to realise that it just isn’t true. And if you’re an app developer, or potential app developer, you can be following this constant wave upwards.

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