Handset shipments dropped 6 percent year-on-year in Taiwan during the April-June period as more consumers put off buying new mobile devices amid the global financial crisis, market researcher International Data Corp (IDC) said in its latest report.
In the second quarter, shipments of cellphones fell to 1.61 million units in Taiwan, compared with 1.71 million units a year ago in the traditionally slack season, the IDC said in a report released last week. On a quarterly basis, that represented an approximately 12 percent decline from 1.83 million units.
“Demand is more sluggish than usual ... The [weakening] economy has greatly affected [the handset shipments],” IDC analyst John Cheng (鄭若望) said in a phone interview.
“We are seeing people start lengthening the replacement cycle for their mobile phones,” the Taipei-based Cheng said.
With fear of economic recession around the globe lingering and the domestic telecom market saturated, Cheng expected the second-quarter decline to carry into the third quarter.
“Another 5 percent to 6 percent year-on-year drop in quarterly shipments during this quarter is foreseeable,” Cheng said.
During the third quarter of last year, handset shipments stood at 1.82 million units, IDC’s statistics show.
Although the third quarter is conventionally a peak season for handsets, sales would be flat this year without seasonal demand, Cheng said.
IDC also found that growth in shipments of converged mobile devices such as smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA) shipments stalled last quarter, against the growing trend in the past years.
Shipments of converged mobile devices dropped 2 percent in the second quarter from the first quarter, the report said.
Besides the economic slowdown and higher prices, IDC said that data “indicates that consumers like to have phones with advanced features such as mobile navigation and touch screen, but they are not features that they must have,” the researcher said.
Mobile users are not buying those marketing slogans emphasizing higher picture resolution, or more convenient music downloading, IDC said.
They just found those features were not attractive enough, it said.
To stave off the downtrend, providing attractive mobile services and bettering channel management could be approaches for mobile phone makers to spur demand, IDC said.
Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung are the top three favorite brands of Taiwanese consumers, IDC said. The three brands control more than 65 percent of the local handset market, the researcher said.
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