IDC’s quarterly report paints a rather gloomy picture of the mobile market: according to the analyst firm, in the last quarter of 2022 and the most popular at the box office, smartphone shipments fell by 18.3% compared to the end of 2021, which is an astonishingly large number. The situation was far from rosy last year, but 367.6 million phones were shipped in the last three months, and the market ended 11.3% worse in 2022 than in 2021.
[+]
Inflation, economic uncertainty, supply difficulties, coronavirus and similar headlines accompany the biggest annual decline seen since 2013, of course, with 1.21 billion smartphones shipped, it is not worth burying the genre. IDC adds: although the number of units launched did not increase at the end of the year, and Chinese shutdowns also took a large part of this, the phones in stock were sold in good numbers thanks to all kinds of promotions.
(source: IDC) [+]
Apple ended the 2022 holiday period in the lead (72.3 million units delivered) and was even able to increase its market share (24.1%), but despite this, 12.7 million fewer iPhones were shipped than a year earlier. Samsung fell both in number of units (58.2 million) and share (19.4%), and this fate awaited Xiaomi (33.2 million, 11%), Oppo (25.3 million, 8.4%) and Vivo (22.9 million, 7.6%).
(source: IDC) [+]
As for 2022 as a whole, gold medalist Samsung (260.9 million mobile phones delivered) and silver medalist Apple (226.4 million) escaped a 4% annual decline in shipments, while the coronavirus hit Chinese brands hard. Xiaomi had to record a 19.8% decline (153.1 million phones shipped), Oppo 22.7% (103.3 million), and Vivo 22.8% (99 million). In the entire mobile market, 155 million fewer smartphones were launched than in 2021, and the signs are not too rosy at the beginning of 2023 either.
