As The iPhone 5S Draws Near, Demand For iPhone Series Drops
While Samsung is enjoying critical acclaim and more importantly for them, commercial success with its latest smartphone in the Galaxy S line, the Samsung Galaxy S 4, Apple is experiencing pretty bad times as demand for their iPhone line dropped alarmingly low. In fact, demand for the Cupertino based Apple hasn’t been this low since six years ago in 2007 implies a research from Canalys, a tech market research and analysis firm. Is this a sign of bad times to come for Apple or is it more likely a sign that people would rather wait for the iPhone 5S before making a purchase? We incline to believe it is the latter, but you never know.
During this year’s last quarter, a number of about 213 million handsets shipped worldwide. Of these 213 million handsets, the vast majority (to be precise, 75.6 %) were smartphones running the Android OS. Of course, tablets are still the devices with the most rapid growth having shipments that grow with 106 percents every year. Samsung’s strategy on the US market involved not only a product to go head to head with the latest iPhone releases (we are of course talking about the Samsung Galaxy S line), but also products for the low and mid range markets. These markets were exploited very good by Samsung and the results were seen immediately: Samsung recorded a growth of 64.2 % this year. This growth was the result of Samsung’s aggressive strategy, a winning strategy that helped the Korean company get more than 30 % of the smartphones market. Apple on the other hand recorded a yearly growth of 6.7 % in iPhone shipments, which is very low compared to Samsung’s numbers. The aforementioned report from Canalysis mentions that this growth of only 6.7 percent represents a low that Apple hasn’t encountered since 2007, the year of the first line of iPhone’s launch.
Pete Cunningham, Principal Analyst at Canalys said that “Despite its slowing growth, Apple still shipped over 37 million iPhones [...] But HTC and Samsung have raised the bar with their latest handsets and Apple needs to respond with its next iPhone. The iPhone user interface is now six years old and badly in need of a refresh.”.
The smartphone market is by far dominated by Samsung and Apple and the first quarter of this year reflected this situation perfectly as Apple and Samsung lead the way on the smartphone market; behind Apple and Samsung there are companies like ZTE, LG and Huawei, all of them having a market share of 15 %in the first quarter of 2013.
Canalys analyst Pete Cunningham ended by saying that “The biggest dilemma that Apple faces is what it does with the size of the display on the next iPhone. It cannot afford to ignore the trend for larger displays in premium smart phones. We expect an increase on the iPhone 5’s 4-inch display but are not anticipating a ‘Phablet’-style iPhone”. Some people are expecting the iPhone 5S to be launched sometime during this years second quarter, however Tim Cook, Apple CEO, made it clear recently that Apple will not release any new iDevice before Fall 2013. We will just have to wait and see what happens. However, one thing is certain: the iPhone 5S has some big shoes to fill. Not only that, but with the Samsung Galaxy S4 already being a big hit, Apple’s next iPhone will have to be a spectacular device in order to recapture part of the lost market share. We are waiting for Apple’s move now.
