Mobile users to surpass 5.5bn by 2022 fueled by growth in India and China

China has toppled the Indian smartphone makers with strategic innovation and marketing already. The continuous reduction of smartphone prices by the Chinese brands will be one factor in leading smartphone subscribers to reach 3.8 billion by 2022, crossing the 50% mark for smartphone penetration by population in 2017. Most of the incremental growth in the subscribers is coming from APAC region, where India remains the fastest growing market

The Drum spoke with Satish Meena, senior forecast analyst at Forrester Research as to what does this mean for global smartphone sales. He said, “Developed countries are witnessing very limited upside in number of new subscriber addition. The main source of sales in these markets is replacement rate. Due to no significant launch with improved features in last few years, the replacement rate is going down, leading to people using handsets for more time than they had in the past.

"The net new sales are coming from APAC and African markets which have issues like pricing, use case for shift to smartphone, battery and high cost of data plans. So overall with increasing adoption the growth rate of global sales is going to remain in single digits in coming years," added Meena.

This increased adoption of smartphones, especially the large screen phones, is leading to a decline in tablet sales and total tablet installed base is predicted to decline at a CAGR of 1.1% from 2017 to 2022, declining from 615 million in 2016 to 579 million in 2022, according to Forrester.

In terms of mobile operating system around 94% smartphone market is captured by Android and iOS and is expected to remain the same in coming years with no clear direction from Microsoft currently. The research also found that, with the rise of Chinese-made phones, the Android ecosystem would continue to rise. By 2017, Android is expected to capture 73% of the market, with Apple claiming 21% and Windows 4%.