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The period of explosive growth in smartphone sales is coming to an end. As Henry Blodget discussed in a special report, in any market, the peak of annual unit gains occurs around the halfway mark of adoption. With smartphone penetration around 50 percent, it looks like we will hit that inflection point soon, if we haven’t already.
As a result, U.S. smartphone sales will become more dependent on replacements and upgrades than attracting new users. Growth in the broader smartphone ecosystem will slow as well and developers will need to generate more revenue out of existing users. On the bright side, many potentially enormous smartphone markets are just getting started.
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