Smartphone industry set for slower growth

Six years to the month after Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, the smartphone industry’s go-go years are officially over.

Cautious comments from Samsung Electronics underlined the message conveyed by the latest quarterly results from Apple earlier in the week: even as it scales new heights, the smartphone market is entering a phase in which vaulting growth rates – and high profit margins – will be much harder to come by. In the developed world, “the people who don’t have a smartphone are either making a choice not to have one, or can’t afford one”, said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner. The developing world, meanwhile, is riding a wave of cut-price devices, many of them closer in nature to feature phones than the high-end smartphones that have put Apple and Samsung at the top. Announcing details of its full-year results, Samsung warned that its smartphone business would be hit in 2013 by growing price competition and slowing demand in developed markets, even as it confirmed record earnings for 2012.