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nltoday at 12:01 AM2 repliesview on HN

In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices:

But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.

We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half.

Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory.

Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.


Replies

zozbot234today at 12:15 AM

Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.

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throwatdem12311today at 12:51 AM

My iPhone 11 hanging on for dear life…

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