Overview:
In this report, we forecast the shipment of key smartphone models by major OEMs until Q4 2023 and it focuses on giving a detailed view of quarterly flagship shipments globally.
The global smartphone market declined by 8% YoY in Q1 2022, shipping 326 million units. The ongoing component shortages and COVID-19 resurgence caused the decline at the beginning of the quarter while the Russia-Ukraine war did it towards the end. But the market presented a mixed bag in Q1 2022.
Samsung and Apple's higher-than-expected growth in shipments showed that the two brands had managed to overcome the component shortages that hit their supplies last year. Samsung was able to exceed 6mn foldable phone shipments in 2021. Thanks to increased production of foldable panel and increased interest from consumers, we expect that Samsung will achieve 12.9mn of foldable device shipment in 2022, more than 65% YoY increase. Apple continued to exceed the market expectation as the demand for the iPhone 13 series remained strong in Q1 2022. However, its expectation for Q2 should be low due to the weaker sales of the iPhone SE than initially expected and component constraints.
Meanwhile, Chinese OEMs such as Xiaomi, OPPO (+OnePlus) and vivo faced a greater component supply crunch, resulting in their shipments falling by 20%, 24% and 29% YoY, respectively. We expect this sluggish performance of Chinese OEMs to continue into the second half of the year due to China's economic slowdown resulting from more transmissible COVID-19 variants and 'zero-COVID' policies. In result, we currently lowered the shipment forecasts for major Chinese OEMs and correspondingly, we also made downward adjustment for shipment forecasts for many of their models in this update.
Published Date: June 2022
