14 DAY TRIAL // According to a recent market research report from ABI Research, the mobile phone market has seen a decline during the first quarter of the ongoing year and is expected to follow the same trend throughout the entire 2009. The report shows that 35 million fewer units were shipped around the world during the first three months of the year compared to the same time frame a year ago.
According to the research firm, although the first quarter of a year is expected to show less performance than the other three, due to seasonal trends, the decrease in shipments registered in this year's Q1 are especially sharp. “The 255.6 million handsets shipped represented a 20 percent decline from Q4 2008, which was already a down quarter, and a nearly 12 percent decline from Q1 2008,” states ABI Research practice director Kevin Burden.
He also says that the entire mobile phone market will see further shipment reductions due to the fact that both the industry and the consumers have “gone into protection mode.” As such, he says, manufacturers make less mobile phones, while operators and retail outlets also have reduced inventories. “Consumers are also realizing that many of the features they desire are already in the handset they currently use, and are willing to forego an upgrade until they have more confidence in their own futures,” Burden added.
The region that was expected to be impacted the most by the downward trends was Asia/Pacific, which has handset volumes three times higher than the next largest region, yet it seems that things were better than expected and only an 8 percent decline on a yearly basis was posted. At the other end, the Latin American market suffered a lot from the recession, and registered a decline in shipments of almost 28 percent, mainly due to devaluation of its currencies, which led to an increase in price for the mobile phones that were imported in the region.
Those who would like to access the research details can find them in ABI Research’s “Mobile Devices Market Forecast Analysis,” which includes data on vendor market share, handset shipments and vendor ASPs, along with other important details.