To the Hon
Survey – Sales at half mast, lack of disruptive innovation, competition from new products with the advent of AI… Tech’s star product of the past 20 years is entering the realm of turbulence.
The question is obviously provocative for a product that sold more than a billion units last year. While all the elites of mobile telephony gather in Barcelona this Monday through Wednesday for the Mobile World Congress, it’s still burning some lips. Could the smartphone, the icon of technology for the past twenty years, be on the wane?
A high set of sectors opens with a worrying observation. In 2023, and for the sixth year in a row, smartphone sales fell by about 3.4%, according to firm IDC. Equipment rates which are high in mature countries, constraints on consumer purchasing power, lack of disruptive innovations… the market is flattening and the shelf life of these equipment is decreasing… extending.
Faced with a dearth of alternatives, the decline has long been described as Arlesian by the industry itself. Not so now. “This is the big question facing the smartphone industry: what kind of device”
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