The once-hot smartphone market in China is expected to cool this year, growing a meager 1.2 percent, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The Chinese smartphone market grew 19.7 percent last year and accounted for nearly a third of all new handsets shipped, according to the International Data Corp’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report.
“China clearly remains a very important market,” IDC program director Ryan Reith said.
“However, the focus will be more on exports than consumption as domestic growth slows significantly,” he said.
The forecast came a day after Apple Inc chief executive Tim Cook said that the California-based company is still seeing “strong growth” in China despite a recent global stock market downturn.
“Obviously I can’t predict the future, but our performance so far this quarter is reassuring,” Cook wrote to CNBC’s Jim Cramer in an e-mail released by the cable channel.
“Additionally, I continue to believe that China represents an unprecedented opportunity over the long term,” he wrote.
IDC trimmed its forecast slightly for the total number of smartphones it expects to be shipped worldwide this year, placing that growth at 10.4 percent, or 1.44 billion units.
Regions with the largest potential for growth in smartphone sales are price sensitive, meaning iPhones are not likely to wrest market share from lower-cost handsets powered by Google Inc-backed Android software, according to IDC.
IDC forecast that shipments of Android smartphones would grow from 1.16 billion this year to 1.54 billion in 2019, while iPhone shipments were expected to grow from 223.7 million to 269.6 million during that same time period.
It also predicted that Android would hold on to its 81 percent share of the smartphone market.
“India has captured a lot of the attention that China previously received and it’s now the market with the most potential upside,” Reith said.
“The interesting thing to watch will be the possibility of manufacturing moving from China and Vietnam over to India,” he added.
Samsung Electronics Co responded to criticism on social media yesterday about its new Galaxy Note 5, acknowledging that the device can break if its stylus is inserted backward in the storage slot.
The S Pen’s uniform width — a different design from the previous model — means it can be inserted upside down into the storage area and cause problems, Samsung said in a statement.
The large screen Note series comes with a stylus that helps users take notes or draw pictures more precisely than with their fingertips.
“If you insert the pen in the opposite direction into the Note 5 slot and put force to get it out, it could damage the S pen and the device resulting in malfunctioning,” Samsung said in an e-mail.
“That doesn’t mean that it’s a defective product,” it said.
Some users complained about the issue on Twitter under the hashtag #PenGate.
Samsung is counting on the Note 5 and the curved-screen Galaxy S6 Edge Plus to help its products stand out from Apple Inc and hundreds of vendors selling smartphones using Google Inc’s Android software.
Samsung said the Note 5 manual already warns of potential misuse, and users can get their devices repaired at a local service center.
The company released the devices this month to get ahead of the next iteration of Apple’s iPhones. They debuted after lackluster sales of the premium Galaxy S6 prompted the company to cut prices.
Samsung fell 1.1 percent yesterday to 1,067,000 won in Seoul, widening its decline for the year to 20 percent.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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