South Korea's smart phone market will be saturated with high growth rate in emerging markets

South Korea, which has always been at the forefront of the smartphone industry, is expected to face a slowing fate this year, and may even experience negative growth in 2016 because the market is saturated. That is to say, in the next four years, the sales volume of Korean smart phones will face the stagnation of growth, and local manufacturers will also be more active in expanding the market share of emerging overseas countries.

South Korea ’s Yonhap and Maeil Business Newspaper reported that Strategy Analytics, a technology market research agency, published a research report on March 31 stating that South Korea ’s smart phone sales will only grow by about 8% to 33.1 million units this year, far less than the 2010 outbreak The 717% of sex is also lower than the 75% growth rate in 2012. South Korea's sales of smart phones in 2010, 2011, and 2012 were 6.94 million, 17.5 million, and 30.7 million, respectively.

According to the report, South Korea's smart phone sales are expected to peak in 2015 (33.8 million), and a growth rate of about -1% in 2016, making the overall market size shrink to about 33.1 million in 2017. The current total population of South Korea is only 50 million.

Analysts expect that by 2017, smart phone sales in emerging countries such as India, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil should have double-digit growth rates every year. For example, the average annual growth rate of smart phone sales in India until 2017 will be expected to reach 30.2%.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google Inc., recently started to expand new markets for Google in the past that he hasn't been involved in. Not only did he go to North Korea for a private humanitarian visit with former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson in January this year, but also Visited Myanmar, the latest investment star in Southeast Asia, on March 22. Since July 2012, Google has strongly promoted its text message e-mail service on major advertising boards and buses in Lagos, Nigeria ’s largest city.

Schmidt said in a Google+ post in March that the Indian telecommunications industry has begun to build basic equipment, and there are also some suppliers that will soon launch smartphones priced at less than $ 100. He believes that the mobile network is about to land on the Indian market. He expects that the network modernization operations that India should have begun should start within two years.

Singapore-based KMD Co. also announced in January that HTC has six mobile phones that will be sold in Myanmar in January, among which the high-end models are One X +, One X and Butterfly, while the low-end models are Desire X, Desire VC and Desire V.

Hongda ’s CEO Zhou Yongming said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in January that Myanmar is opening up and opportunities are everywhere. He said that the local mobile phone market is mainly dominated by low-cost models, and HTC will take it slowly, so entering Myanmar will still not be able to benefit from shipments in the short term.