Global smartphone shipments are expected to grow at a slower annual rate of 12.4 percent next year, due to the growing penetration rate of smartphones, a market research team at Taipei-based TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday.
Growth would slow down compared with this year’s forecast 25.9 percent, TrendForce said.
Global smartphone shipments are set to increase to 1.16 billion units this year and the number would expand to 1.31 billion units next year, it said.
“The longer life cycle of smartphones also slows down replacement demand and weakens growth momentum,” TrendForce analyst Avril Wu (吳雅婷) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
Chinese smartphone companies would be the main growth drivers, with shipments forecast to grow 17 percent next year, Wu said.
Wu said she previously predicted that global smartphone shipments would only increase 25 percent from last year. Strong sales of Apple Inc’s new iPhone 6 series would boost the shipment growth by 0.9 percent, she said.
Apple’s better-than-expected iPhone sales was driven by consumers’ demand for larger-screen smartphones, rather than a hardware upgrade, Wu said.
However, Android or Windows system users might be more price-oriented as there are many similar products on the market, she said, adding that the strong sales of Asustek Computer Inc’s (華碩) Zenfone smartphones was driven by its affordable price.
Asustek recently said it sold more than 1 million Zenfones in Taiwan since the product’s launch in April, and more than 1 million units per month worldwide.
Wu said HTC Corp (宏達電) promoted a series of mid-priced smartphones this year, including the Desire 816, Desire 820 dual SIM and Desire 620, which suggest the company is also striving for a share of the mid-priced market.
Wu said mid-priced smartphones with high-performance ratios might still be smartphone players’ growth driver next year, but added that these products might also bring limited profitability to the companies because of the lower gross margin compared with high-priced products.
Wu said she expects manufacturers of mid-priced smartphones to face fierce price competition in the markets, especially in China, where many players target this segment.
The analyst said she predicts the product differentiation trend for high-end smartphones to focus on hardware innovations, such as dual or multiple lenses, or 3D screen display.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS