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China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

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Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#21

Post by dv_dt »

killjoywashere wrote: post #3
nadioca wrote: post #2

market saturation ?

Read Hank Paulson's book, Dealing with China. The Communist Party can only extract so much value from to masses while corruption and opacity are the norm in government. Instead of looking at the economy as a virtuous cycle of re-investment making more resources available for collateral, they treat the economy like a well and wonder why it keeps running dry.

I can't help but think the "The Communist Party" in your comment could be replaced with any small group of people with defacto power over a nation ...

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#22

Post by lazerpants »

lnx01 wrote: post #9
diminish wrote: post #5

After relentless growth we're about to arrive at a plateauing smartphone market. I wish I could read insights from experts on what to expect in coming years in smartphone market in light of similar markets which entered a no growth zone. Specifically what will happen to prices, market shares , unit sales, pace of innovation, competition, international growth, developer ecosystems. Anyone?

I'm no analyst - but I think we'll see a drop in price to drive demand along with a consequential decline in quality. Those 'high end', 'good bang for your buck' flagships will be even cheaper and even more cheaply made.

I think you missed a couple of interesting items. I suspect there will be more feature competition: get ready for water resistant mid and low tier phones, and tons of competition to have the best in class camera in top and mid tier phones.

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#23

Post by rqs »

genefriend wrote: post #13

China’s growth fueled by massive debt is over(350% to gdp, government + corporate + individuals). it’s barely returning one yuan for every yuan debt it takes on. The Chinese consumer is weighed down by housing debt and credit card debt. And the tariff is going to hit the consumers hard; soy prices increases already has Chinese consumers screaming.

Wonder where is your data is came from.

According to an article[0] on Bloomberg, it's 266% of GDP. Anything I've missed?

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-03/china-s-a...

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#24

Post by hugh4life »

diminish wrote: post #5

After relentless growth we're about to arrive at a plateauing smartphone market. I wish I could read insights from experts on what to expect in coming years in smartphone market in light of similar markets which entered a no growth zone. Specifically what will happen to prices, market shares , unit sales, pace of innovation, competition, international growth, developer ecosystems. Anyone?

Hopefully a plateauing of the smartphone market along with China starting to produce memory will start to bring memory prices down.

And then manufacturers will consider adding 8-16GB of memory... and at that point I wonder if more people will just use their phone docked to a monitor as their PC if Apple/Google/Microsoft do a better job facilitating it.

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#25

Post by Eyght »

bruceb wrote: post #15

Almost any $200+ phone made since 2015 has a pretty good camera, screen, speed for most people. Why upgrade when what you have is good enough? One used to check out gizmodo/engadget when a new phone came out but seems not anymore as "the new" is only incremental.

I've been using the same phone for almost 4 years now (oneplus one). It came with 3gb ram and 64gb storage and cost about $300, vat included. There are two tells that I'm using an old phone. The camera is really bad compared to the current ones, and it doesn't have any biometric unlock.

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#26

Post by bilbo0s »

bruceb wrote: post #15

Almost any $200+ phone made since 2015 has a pretty good camera, screen, speed for most people. Why upgrade when what you have is good enough? One used to check out gizmodo/engadget when a new phone came out but seems not anymore as "the new" is only incremental.

It's interesting because, even though I make the conscious effort to keep my iPhone 5, I thought MOST people upgraded? Reading through a lot of these comments, it seems that's not the case. That's surprising but comforting. Having teenage daughters I really started to get a kind of inferiority complex. Thinking, "Man, am I being unreasonably stubborn here?" But it always just seemed like the phone worked, so why upgrade?

It does make me wonder, however, what's next for Samsung and Apple? Is it that there are still more than enough people upgrading to make plenty of money? Or will they have to come up with new non-smartphone products in the future?

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#27

Post by klodolph »

bruceb wrote: post #15

Almost any $200+ phone made since 2015 has a pretty good camera, screen, speed for most people. Why upgrade when what you have is good enough? One used to check out gizmodo/engadget when a new phone came out but seems not anymore as "the new" is only incremental.

People upgrade because what they have becomes worse as time goes on. Maybe you don't get OS updates any more and you can't run apps you want, maybe you do get OS updates and your phone is now slower. Maybe your battery charge lasts less than a day and you don't know you can replace your battery or don't want to. Some people I know almost always end up with cracked screens and upgrade rather than repair, and some other people play Ingress or Pokemon Go so heavily that their batteries don't even last a full day.

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#28

Post by genefriend »

htormey wrote: post #18
genefriend wrote: post #13

China’s growth fueled by massive debt is over(350% to gdp, government + corporate + individuals). it’s barely returning one yuan for every yuan debt it takes on. The Chinese consumer is weighed down by housing debt and credit card debt. And the tariff is going to hit the consumers hard; soy prices increases already has Chinese consumers screaming.

I’d love to see an article summing up some of these concerns re Chinese debt. If you have a good one please post it. Thanks.

“China's total debt surpassed 304 percent of GDP as of May 2017," the IIF noted.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/06/28/chi...

“the rate of growth is strong, rising more than 80 percentage points from January of the same year. The household debt-to-disposable income ratio is catching up to developed country levels, having reached 68.3% by the end of 2016.“

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/sarahsu/20...

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#29

Post by nopinsight »

genefriend wrote: post #13

China’s growth fueled by massive debt is over(350% to gdp, government + corporate + individuals). it’s barely returning one yuan for every yuan debt it takes on. The Chinese consumer is weighed down by housing debt and credit card debt. And the tariff is going to hit the consumers hard; soy prices increases already has Chinese consumers screaming.

Interestingly, the US' total private and public debt amounts to 3.5 times the GDP as well but few seem to have as much concern over its debt as they do China's. Also, the UK appears to have a similar level of private debt as the US, and only a bit less public debt.

On public debt alone, China:UK:US is 66:85:107 percent of GDP, according to the IMF.

So what is the reason for major concerns over one but not others? Developed vs developing countries? Stronger vs weaker financial institutions/systems? Something else?

Note that a key measure that the US and other developed countries tend to be ahead of most developing countries is national wealth, i.e. its assets minus liabilities, as a percentage of GDP. (This is unsurprising since they have much more time to accumulate assets.)

"As of the first quarter of 2010, the Federal Reserve estimated that total public and private debt owed by American households, businesses, and government totaled $50 trillion, or roughly $175,000 per American and 3.5 times GDP."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unit...

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/private-debt-to-g...

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/private-debt-to-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_de...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_wealth

Re: China smartphone market suffers hard-landing, shipments decline 21% in Q1 2018

#30

Post by makomk »

genefriend wrote: post #13

China’s growth fueled by massive debt is over(350% to gdp, government + corporate + individuals). it’s barely returning one yuan for every yuan debt it takes on. The Chinese consumer is weighed down by housing debt and credit card debt. And the tariff is going to hit the consumers hard; soy prices increases already has Chinese consumers screaming.

I'm astounded how little discussion the effects of China imposing tariffs on Chinese people has been getting really. Everyone's happy to talk about how imposing tariffs would just hit poor people the hardest and how retaliatory tariffs are a terrible idea when the topic is American tariffs, but the discussion of Chinese tariffs on food is all about the effects on American farmers - there's very little about them hurting China, even though they should if we applied those same theories on tariffs to them.
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