Re: If I sold 150 Mio. gadgets…
Basic smartphones are now lowering in price and pushing out feature phones, so the size of the smartphone market is increasing while that of the feature phone market shrinks. That doesn't mean that the value of the market has changed much, just that it's being counted differently. The numbers that Apple, Samsung, HTC et al. are *really* going to care about is how much profit was made; and the overwhelming majority of that profit comes from the high-end devices. The 'trouble' is that a 2-year-old high-end smartphone is absolutely fine, so people are sitting out their 2 year contracts rather than upgrading early, so while the addressable market is growing, the frequency of repeat business is tailing off; published sales of the Galaxy S4 look like it is going to sell a-bit-but-not-much more than the S3 did (10-15%?), but the marketing push has front-loaded that (i.e. more sales immediately post-launch but a quicker fall-off).
So, breaking news: after 5 years of crazy growth, the market is maturing. With the most profitable part of the market saturated, lower-margin markets must be tapped to continue profit growth. The trickiest thing is to avoid cannibalising too much of your high-end, high-margin market by introducing a new cheaper - sorry, more affordable - product but Apple have form on managing this fairly well and I've heard just one or two isolated rumours about a cheaper iPhone...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
