What They Say
Digitimes Research is forecasting that smartphone sales will be up 50% year on year to 340 million units in Q1 2021 with sales of Apple handsets going well (forecast at >60 million), while Chinese brands ramp up shipment volumes to fill the gap left by Huawei. Apple is likely to be the top vendor for the six months to the end of March, with shipments of over 150 million units, up 38% from last year, while Samsung will sell between 60 and 65 million in the last two quarters to put the firm in second place. Xiaomi will be third at 90 million while Huawei will drop to sixth place.
Global shipments of 5G-enabled phones are expected to reach over 600 million units in 2021 compared to 280 million units shipped a year earlier, Digitimes Research estimates. Huawei, Apple and Samsung were the top-three 5G phone vendors in 2020, accounting for over 70% of global 5G phone shipments. Digitimes Research also revises upward the annual growth of global smartphone shipments for 2021 to 10-13% for a total of over 1.4 billion units.
What We Think
No real surprise here, but I thought this was a useful set of data points. It’s nearly ten years since Steve Jobs died and since then Apple’s iPhone, launched in 2007, has continued to go from strength to strength under Tim Cook. In digging around for this article, I saw that I missed an announcement in January that Apple has a billion active users. Some achievement.
Although I was well connected with Apple long, long ago (I was chairman of the Apple User Group in the UK in the early ’80s), I never met Steve Jobs although I saw him on stage quite a few times (including the European launch of the Macintosh!). I had two friends who had very different views of him. One worked at Apple and said that he was amazing. In a meeting, Jobs heard about some supply chain changes that would reduce component costs and my friend was amazed that Jobs was able to convert this, immediately, into a product plan to exploit the change.
The other friend was working as a partner to Apple when Jobs came back to Apple and his firm had spent a couple of years and a lot of resources to make an Apple clone, with the previous management’s blessing and cooperation. Jobs didn’t like the idea and told my friend and other partners to, to phrase it more politely than I heard it, “Get lost! You will never make copies of Apple products”. He had a different view of the man – as you can imagine. (BR)
