This year's worldwide smartphone market growth rate would decelerate to a single-digit figure.
Strategy Analytics, America's market research firm, said that the global smartphone market would grow 8 percent this year from 16 percent in 2015.
Since Apple Inc. launched the sale of its iPhone in 2007, the market's growth rate reached 71 percent within three years in 2010. Since that time on, the annual growth rate has declined to the 40-percent level in 2012 and the 20-percent level in 2014.
The barriers to entry have been lowered ever since, with scores of new entrants in China. Presently there are 1,300 smartphone manufacturers across the world, four times more than that of TV makers.
According to Strategy Analytics, emerging markets will see steep growth ahead although developed country markets have already reached a saturation point. It also said that the markets of India and Indonesia will record the highest growth rate from this year to 2020. For example, the Indian smartphone market is estimated to grow 26 percent and 17 percent in 2016 and 2017 after making a growth of 43 percent last year. The Indonesian market will also grow 12 percent this year.
In contrast, the growth rate for China, which has led the global smartphone market growth for years, will likely be 7 percent this year and 3 percent in 2017. As for India, according to Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics, it will become the world's second-largest smartphone market by overtaking the United States in 2017.
