Chinese smartphone market to mature, annual growth expected to slow down by 2015

The International Data Corporation, an American market research company, claims that China is slowly transforming into a mature smartphone market, as more than 40% of the 1 billion Chinese phone users currently sport smartphones. As a result, the annual growth of the Chinese smartphone market will fall down to 10% by the end of 2015, IDC forecasts.

We already informed you that another research predicts that some 400 million smartphones will be sold in China in 2014. Of course, the majority of these to-be-sold devices will be mostly mid- and low-end smartphones, manufactured locally. OEMs like Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, Xioami, and Oppo are expected to dominate the Chinese market in 2014 and in the beginning of 2015.

Although smartphone prices in China have greatly decreased and roughly 60% of the users still sport feature phones, most of them won't be able to upgrade to a smartphone. Why? Because of the significantly higher monthly bills, which most Chinese consumers won't be able to afford.

However, underdeveloped smartphone markets in the region, such as India, Indonesia, and the Philippines are expected to grow significantly in the upcoming years. Let's take India as an example - only 10% of the mobile phone users there use smartphones, which is a big opportunity for the smartphone manufacturers to penetrate the local market. For example, Apple seized this opportunity for market expansion in India by relaunching the iPhone 4.

source: The Wall Street Journal