Mobile devices, in my research, include basic and smart phones, (non-PC) tablets, audio and wearable devices. For the most part their processing is done by ARM chips. They allow us to take computing on the road and form one of the largest and most innovative sub-section of the overall IT market. In this post I’ll look at the shape of the market over the last few years by form factor, region and supplier and share my forecast for coming years.
In 2022 there were 1.6 billion shipments of mobile device; adding to those from previous years this created an installed base of 3.5 billion at the end of the year. The revenue attributable to mobile device suppliers reached $486 billion.
My Figure above shows these stats and demonstrate the lead smart phones have over other types – now in revenue, shipments and installed base. The large difference that basic phone devices have of revenue and shipments underlines how comparatively cheap these are today.
Looking at the same data by vendor instead of form factor demonstrates the extent to which Apple leads this market; in 2022 it was the largest shipper of mobile devices, its products accounted for over half of all the spending and it has a substantially larger installed base than any one else. Having begun its smartphone business in 2005, Apple maintains a mainly proprietary approach; it builds its own operating systems and hardware and doesn’t attend the Mobile World Congress, which starts next week, for instance.
Samsung is the largest of the others, scoring a market share of 17.8% in shipments and 16.1% in revenue in 2022. Aside from the devices themselves Samsung is also a major component manufacturer of advanced NAND and DRAM memory and digital displays. It was the first chip supplier to produce 5nm microprocessors and is working with NTT in Japan on Private and Public 5g solutions. It also has a Home Appliance division. Arguably it has more potential than Apple of becoming an early master of the IoT market.
Huawei was the third largest supplier of mobile devices in 2022. It achieved an 11.4% share of shipments and 4.1% of sales in the year. Its success as a global supplier has been severely hampered by US sanctions taken against it for some years, which sees it as a security risk due to its close ties with the Chinese government.
The next four vendors – Xiaomi, BBK, ZTE and Lenovo – are also Chinese. Their global businesses have also been shaped by US sanctions.
Mobile device sales have been higher in Asia Pacific than in either the Americas or EMEA for many years (see my Figure above for the period between 2005 and 2022, where the dotted lines show values using constant 2005 exchange rates of the Yuan Renimbi and Euro against the $US for Asia Pacific and EMEA respectively). Sales in EMEA by year have been very similar to those in the Americas since 2015 – disconcerting for many Europeans, given that region’s early technical head-start in telecommunications.
There was a sales downturn in all three regions in 2020 due to temporary factory closures, supply-chain challenges and chip shortages at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; following that sales were up in 2021 and down again in 2022.
The mobile device market has been shaped by the introduction of new product types that take advantage of innovative breakthroughs in components and battery lives. I show all the shipment totals of the major types in my Figure above, which includes my annual forecast to 2025. We have witnessed the dramatic rise of smart phones as replacements to basic phones, the slow decline of audio devices (such as the iPod) and the smaller growth of smart tablets and smart wearables.
Like radios, TVs and fixed-line phones, mobile devices are used by the majority people alive. They overtook PCs as the most-used client computing device many years ago. Apple entered the market in 2005, playing a different game from its competitors – many of which have since disappeared from the market. It is now one of the largest companies in the world – a clear leader of the ITC market in revenues. It will be interesting to see whether it can maintain this position and the degree to which it has to modify its strategy as we enter the era of consumer IoT, when product shipments will be measured in billions, rather than hundreds of millions.
Information Technology and Communications research
