Worldwide sales of smartphones to end users surpassed those of feature phones for the first time ever last year, Gartner Inc said in a market report.
A total of 968 million smartphones were sold to end users around the world last year, amounting to 53.6 percent of overall mobile phone sales last year, the US-based technology consultancy said.
Smartphone sales increased significantly from 2012, rising 42.3 percent last year, Gartner said. They were especially strong in the final quarter of last year, when the number of devices sold grew 36 percent year-on-year and accounted for 57.6 percent of overall mobile phone sales — up from 44 percent in the last quarter of 2012 — it added.
Gartner attributed the sales increase to the growth seen in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Conversely, mobile phone sales in developed regions fell due to weaker demand there, it said.
“Mature markets face limited growth potential, as they are saturated with smartphones, leaving little room for growth, with a declining feature phone market and a longer replacement cycle,” Gartner principal research analyst Anshul Gupta said.
Feature phones are devices that lie somewhere between smartphones and basic mobile phones, and are capable only of making voice calls and sending text messages. They are moderately priced and have more functions than basic mobile phones.
Smartphones are expected to continue to drive overall mobile phone sales this year and an increasing number of manufacturers will realign their portfolios to focus on the low-cost sector, Gartner predicted.
Taipei-based Digitimes Research last week said that global smartphone shipments could grow by more than 30 percent to 1.24 billion units this year, as emerging markets continue to toss out feature phones and embrace smart devices, including in China, which is expected to make up 35 percent of the world smartphone market this year.
While Taiwan’s market is nowhere near as big as China’s, local consumers have demonstrated an undeniable love for their smartphones, Digitimes said.
A survey conducted by Google Inc and market research firm Ipsos MediaCT late last year found that 81 percent of the Taiwanese smartphone users polled do not leave home without their devices, a larger proportion than in Japan (80 percent), Hong Kong (77 percent), Singapore (73 percent), South Korea (63 percent) and China (44 percent).
Nearly all Taiwanese smartphone users use their devices to conduct many aspects of their personal lives, with 93 percent of respondents saying they use their phones for social networking and 41 percent reporting that they use them to share updates with family and friends via sites like Facebook, the survey found.
A separate survey by Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) in December last year suggested that 80 percent of the nation’s smartphone owners use their mobile devices to access the Internet, mostly to use messaging apps, connect to social networks and search for information.
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