So Q4 is a quarter that companies from grocers to computer repair to smartphone companies look forward to. It’s the holiday shopping season, of course. However, smartphone companies might want to forget this one. Because smartphone growth ends 2018 in a drag.
So when I say drag, I mean sales grew just 0.1% from Q4 2017. Ouch. Apparently, high end smartphone lovers (think iPhone X, Google Pixel 3, Samsung Galaxy 9) saw no reason to upgrade. Apple got the worst of it. Because Q4 2018 was their worst quarter since early 2016. In fact, they told investors not to expect a prosperous Q1 2019 either. Their sales continue to decrease literally to this day.
Samsung isn’t fairing much better. Not only did they have a bad Q4 2018, but their overall sales in the recent past fell off. As I stated before, their Galaxy 9 phones aren’t helping matters much. They can partially thank Android’s Huawei phones. They sold over 60 million smartphones between October-December 2018. The majority of these sales come from China, one of the greatest smartphone markets around today. In fact, Huawei is probably the only one that had a good Q4 2018. Their sales for that period grew 14.8 % from Q4 2017. This is while everybody else struggled to break even from one year ago. Some publications went as far as calling 2018 the year of the Huawei.
However, for all others, smartphone growth ends 2018 in a drag. And if something revolutionary doesn’t come from the smartphone game in 2019, then I don’t see an end in sight. Location wise, the worst drops were right here in North America. Then follow that with China and the rest of Asia. That’s alarming for smartphone companies because these nations (US, China, India, Japan, etc) are their money maker. Some experts say that in mature markets, like the smartphone, sales start declining when pretty much everybody has them. But let’s hear from you. Why do you think smartphones are decking?