How Global Smartphone Sales Growth Ground to a Halt 

After years of rapid growth, the global smartphone market is shrinking as consumers wait for the next game-changing feature and some of the biggest markets reach saturation. That’s bad news for the technology giants. Apple Inc. cut its sales forecast for the first time in almost two decades while industry leader Samsung Electronics Co. is looking at innovations such as foldable screens to counter its own weaker sales. Meanwhile a crop of Chinese challengers that includes Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Huawei are pushing overseas as the market peaks at home. The initial boom may be over, but smartphones -- one of the most popular consumer products ever introduced -- remain a vital part of the global economy. There were 1.4 billion of the devices shipped in 2018 and there are still billions of people without one.

Apple didn’t invent the smartphone but it certainly sparked the modern era of web-connected devices with the first iPhone in 2007. The next year the first device powered by Android debuted, and sales exploded. The number of smartphones shipped in 2013 surged 40 percent from the year before, according to IDC data, then growth slowed in 2014 to 28 percent. The first contraction came in 2017, a 2.5 percent decline, and was followed by a further 4.1 percent drop in 2018 as demand in China slumped.