IDC: China's smartphone market growth will slow to 10% next year

Selling mobile phone stall (Tencent technology map) Tencent Science and Technology Ming Xuan March 6 compiled in the past two years, the smartphone in the Chinese market has increased shipments of nearly four times times, which also makes China become the world's largest smartphone market. But IDC, the market research firm, predicts that the annual growth rate in China's smartphone market is expected to fall to around 10% per cent in 2015. Kalangit Core Kiranjeet Kaur, a senior market analyst at IDC, said the Chinese market is becoming more of a mature market for smartphones. China currently has nearly 1 billion mobile subscribers, about 40% of them using smartphones, IDC said. That means more than hundreds of millions of Chinese are using traditional feature phones, but they don't immediately upgrade to smartphones completely. Cole believes that most Chinese who can easily afford smartphones already have smartphones, and the remainder may take longer to use smartphones. Wang Jingwen, a market research firm Canalys analyst Jingwen Wang, said that while the price of smartphones in the Chinese market has slipped a lot and some models are priced at less than 50 dollars, some are still unable to pay because the use of smartphones will generate more spending. IDC also noted that emerging markets in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines, expect smartphone demand to grow strongly over the next few years. China's leading smartphone makers, including Lenovo Group, have already tried to increase their presence in the markets. For example, India's smartphone users now account for less than 10% of mobile phone users. Last year, India's smartphone shipments accounted for only 17% of total mobile phone shipments. That means there is still room for growth in the Indian smartphone market. Even if growth slows, the Chinese market will remain an important smartphone market, IDC said. Given the size of China's market, the current smartphone users are so big that they can't afford to let manufacturers miss the opportunity. A major opportunity for smartphone makers in China today is the need for carriers to support long-term evolutionary technology (LTE) handsets with 4G networks.