[LINK] "Smartphone Growth Is Slowing. That’s Great News for Apple"

[rfmcdonald]

Wired's Davey Alba looks at the economics of the global smartphone market, and Apple's resilience in said.

Since smartphones have been around, people have been buying them. Lots of them—the market has grown exponentially over the past decade. But now, for the first time, market research firm IDC is predicting that 2015 will be the first year that the rate at which the worldwide smartphone market expands will sink into single digits. Turns out, most people who want smartphones probably already have ’em. Counterintuitively, this is to Apple’s benefit.

IDC’s new report today predicts total smartphone shipments in 2015 will amount to a 9.8 percent increase compared to last year, or 1.43 billion units. According to the firm, growth has slowed in the Asia Pacific region, Latin America, and Western Europe.

Not surprisingly, IDC expects that Windows Phones and other phones running on operating systems other than Android or iOS will ship in significantly less quantities in the future.

But a much more pointed reason for slowing growth is the changing market dynamics in China. As the world’s largest smartphone market, representing about one-third of total smartphone sales globally, China has the scale to shift global trends. And in China, the smartphone market is saturated, which means growth has stagnated. First-time buyers have vanished, meaning the growth potential in the country is now in the upgrade market.

“In past years, feature phone users were converting to first-time smartphone buyers,” Anthony Scarsella, a research manager with IDC’s mobile phones team, tells WIRED. “That’s shifting out of China right now.”