The Market: In December, handset sell-through grew by 3%. Holiday sales were strong in the European markets and some South Asian markets. Demand in China improved only slightly. Sell-in dropped as vendors like Samsung stopped stocking the market early in December helping the inventory situation.
Smartphones increased to 77% of the market in December. Except for a few players such as Apple, Sony, and Motorola sales of smartphones in December decreased for most vendors. However, share of smartphones in total vendor volume increased; thus feature phones volume declined, again
Vendors: Samsung recovered a bit with a slight increase in sales, however it struggled in its home country Korea. Apple and Xiaomi also had healthy sales. Microsoft/Nokia had a decent performance through its low-priced Windows phones. Its recent launches of new Lumia smartphones should bolster performance in the low end still further.
Transfer Price-band analysis: More than half of the handsets sold (smartphones + feature phones) (59%) were priced below $199 with Samsung and Microsoft/Nokia accounting for one-fourth of this. Half the smartphones were priced less than $199; Apple dominated $400 and above segment with 57% due to continued success of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Hardware Features: Handset features have shifted more towards offering higher camera resolutions. In December, 72% of the smartphones had 8M pixel or above camera. Quad-core is also becoming a common feature with over 50% penetration in smartphones. LTE segment expanded further with 53% of share in all smartphones sold in December.
Table of Contents
- Key Tekeaways
- Monthly Research Topics
- CES 2015 : Key Technology Trends
- The Market
- Market Sizing – Demand and Supply
- O/S landscape
- Market by Price band
- Competitive Landscape
- Country Analysis: US/China/Korea/Japan
- Market share by Price band
- Vendor Analysis: revenue structures
- Features and Specs
- Hardware trends and feature adoption rates
- Average feature sets
- Vendor market share by feature set
- Hit model lists for major vendors, globally