مردم جهان در سال 2014 چه تعداد اسمارت فون خریده اند ؟

Apple is reaping the biggest rewards right now when it comes to selling its smartphones and other devices, but the overall picture for the smartphone market in the year ahead may be a little less rosy. According to the analysts at Germany-based GfK, in 2014 there were 1.2 billion smartphones sold, up 23% on the year before and crossing the billion-unit point for the first time. But they predict sales will slow down to 14% growth in 2015, working out to total sales of 1.368 billion devices.

The reason? More countries are reaching their smartphone saturation point, and so the industry is looking ever more for growth in two places: emerging markets where smartphone adoption is still at an early stage; and among consumers flocking to buying newer models with larger screens.

Looking back on 2014, GfK’s numbers speak to how a collective population of feature phone users — which were still the majority of sales at the start of the year — shifted to becoming smartphone owners. Android took many of those newbies under its green wing.

GfK’s numbers are worth noting because the company tracks actual sales of devices from more than 90 markets. In contrast, companies like Strategy Analytics and IDC track shipments, and perhaps as a result, their numbers appear to come out a bit higher than GfK’s.

Kevin Walsh, a trends analyst director with GfK, says that coupled with the focus on emerging markets where consumers will be more price sensitive, pricing will continue to drop, too.

“We forecast emerging regions to drive growth in 2015 as smartphones further penetrate lower price points,” he says. “GfK forecasts that smartphone price bands above $150 will see a decline in their market share. At the next level down, $100-150, sales will remain stable, but it is the cheaper smartphones priced below this point that will gain share.” GfK notes that every region except for North America and developed Asia Pacific markets like Japan and Korea saw a decrease in the average selling price in Q4 2014.

Although prices may be shrinking, the screens are doing anything but that. Unit sales of smartphones with larger screens of 5” or more grew 180% in 2014 and will be the largest segment in 2015. No surprise that this trend is eating into the tablet market, too.

As you can see in the table above, when it comes to which region saw the most growth in smartphone usage last year, Latin America saw the most active buyers, with sales up to nearly 110 million, a rise of 59%. Emerging Asia Pacific countries came a close second with 55% growth.

At the other end of the spectrum is high volume but slower growth. In China, there were nearly 400 million smartphones sold — almost one-third of the global total — but the country is now in the saturated market category, seeing growth of only 9% last year, with growth slowing to a flat standstill in Q4. Despite that, GfK notes that “China will remain the biggest market in terms of both unit and value sales for the foreseeable future.” Total sales of smartphones in Q4 in China were up to $28 billion, a rise of 21 percent.

Likewise, Japan and other “developed” Asia Pacific countries saw smartphone sales actually decline by 5% in 2014 (and down 4% in Q4 alone), due in part to changes in handset subsidies in Korea but also that continued issue of market saturation.

North America appears to be the region with a happy medium: it had the largest number of smartphones sold after China for the year, but also coupled that with above average growth of 28%.