Roger Fingas
Chief Apple rival Samsung Electronics on Tuesday warned investors that it would report disappointing results for the March quarter, foremost blaming "weakening overall demand."
The company also cited a "widening price fall among major products," linked to dropping prices for chips and LCDs, according to the New York Times. While best known in the U.S. for smartphones like the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Fold, the company is a major manufacturer in the phone, tablet, and computer industries. Most iPhone OLED panels are made by Samsung.
Samsung has been hit by Chinese competition as well, and in fact saw its overall Chinese sales fall 25 percent in the December quarter to $13.17 billion. The Chinese government has also been fostering local chip production, leading to stockpiling in Japan and South Korea as supply outstrips demand.
Apple made a similar announcement in early January, warning that its Jan. 29 results would fall billions of dollars short of guidance. The company recorded $84.3 billion in revenue, a result of iPhone shipments being down 15 percent year-over-year. The product was hit particularly hard in China, owing to a combination of a weak economy, exchange rates, Apple's decision to hike entry prices, and above all lower-cost alternatives from local brands like Huawei.
Both Apple and Samsung are suffering from a global decline in smartphone demand. The December quarter saw shipments slide 7 percent, a fifth quarterly decline — this may be in no small part because people are holding onto phones longer, having no special reason to upgrade unless their phone breaks, becomes too slow, or can't hold a charge. Many in the smartphone industry are pinning their hopes on 5G cellular data, which can be up to 10 times faster than high-end 4G, when widely deployed.
Christine McKee
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29 Comments
Market may indeed be saturated but has anyone even seen what passes for the top of the line Samsung phone? On a rare walk through Best Buy last weekend I saw them and stopped to take a look, as I do once every couple years just to see where they're at. What a POS. It still looks like some confused relic from the palmOS era, and I can't believe they're still pretending like anyone wants a screen with curved edges. As is well known, this was a bad bet Samsung made in the run up to the iPhone 6 release, where the always-wrong rumor mill was flinging around the idea of a screen that curves at the edges...when of course it was just Apple curving the glass on the edges to make it nice to hold and swipe. But Samsung doubled-down on the rumor to try and beat Apple to the punch, and they did...with something no one ever wanted, and Apple never even considered.
Smartphones are now a mature product and the days of huge leaps of capability worth paying for are gone.
It is time for prices to come down- way down.
Countless millions of us want a high-performance iPhone but do not give a whit about AR and do not play games on them. We do not want a degraded screen or CPU, but do not really care about the camera beyond FaceTime. What would really be nice is an iPhone with a shelf life of more than 2 years that allowed owners to buy and put in a new battery ourselves without taking the thing apart.
You mean the forum experts were wrong when they claimed soft sales at Apple were due to Tim Cook being greedy and lack of innovation? Shocking, just shocking!