Smartphones will again occupy nearly half of the consumer budget for tech and durable goods in 2020 and will generate a total turnover of €444 billion, according to GFK, a leading market research firm.
The demand for smartphones is expected to stay stable in 2020, after a slight decline of two percent in units in 2019. GfK experts estimate that in 2020 more than 1.37 billion smartphones will be sold globally. However, depending on the impact of the coronavirus on global supply chains and production capacities, the demand could be significantly slowed. These are GfK findings for the global smartphone market.
“Impressing the consumers with groundbreaking innovations has been a challenge in recent years. Especially when it comes to the market for smartphones” says Pavlin Lazarov, GfK expert for Telecom. “The interaction with what is probably the most personal device has increased to such high levels and with it the expectation for its hardware and performance. One can say that premium and performance have now become the standard.”
Following the mantra “the more, the better” the smartphone features continue to offer more and improved capabilities. The share of smartphones with a display of at least 6” has reached 70 percent in unit terms in 2019, up from a share of 24 percent in 2018. Results from GfK global consumer surveys show that despite the cloud storage services, consumers consider the internal storage as the most important feature when choosing a smartphone. This explains why 37 percent of all smartphones sold in 2019 have 128GB of storage or more.
Half of the consumers point out to the battery life as one of the most important features when buying a new smartphone. As a result, 38 percent of the smartphones sold in 2019 had a battery capacity of at least 4,000 mAh. Performance speed and battery life are also crucial for 44 percent of consumers, who use smartphones for gaming.
At the end of the day, the benefits from the features should transform into rich experiences, which consumers are expecting and appreciating while using smartphones, said GfK.
