Despite the recent slowing down of smartphone sales, there’s still a lot of growth happening at the low end of the market and the number of smartphone devices is set to triple in the next five years.
The latest report from telecommunications company Ericsson claims the smartphone revolution has just begun. The company is predicting the smartphone and tablet market will nearly triple in the next five years.
High-end markets like the US and Western Europe have been slowing down lately, mainly due to penetration rates reaching 80-90% of the population. However, there are still billions of people in the world living in developing countries such as India, China, South America and Africa who have yet to jump on the smartphone bandwagon.
Ericsson predicts most of the growth seen by 2019 will come from the Asia/Pacific market. That part of the world accounts for 988 million smartphone subscriptions right now, but that number is expected to rise to more than 3 billion before the end of this decade.
Developed markets will also contribute to this increase in smartphone sales, mainly by purchasing secondary subscriptions, with people owning more than one smartphone or pairing up such devices with tablets, notebooks and other mobile broadband services.
As you’d expect with such a sharp increase in smartphone sales, data traffic is also set to go up by a record amount. If this report is correct, we’re likely to see a tenfold increase in mobile traffic in the next five years. LTE is bound to play a huge role in the near future while LTE-A and 5G are bound to be our driving infrastructure for the long term.
It’s clear why so many companies, like Microsoft and Samsung, are betting on the low-end. With so much predicted growth, owning a part of this ever expanding pie can mean the difference between a market leader and struggling player.
Source and Images: Ericsson Mobility Report