Personal Tech
Buyers put off by rising prices expected to turn to second-hand phones instead
Unless your personal tech budget has bloated, prepare to stick with your current smartphone for a while thanks to AI-driven demand that has driven up memory prices and made new handsets so expensive that sales are falling dramatically.So says research firm CCS Insight, which expects smartphone shipments to fall by 15 percent this year as some entry-level devices have already seen their sticker prices go up by more than 50 percent since last year. The firm found that the primary smartphone market (meaning new devices) contracted 4.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, despite sales channels front-loading (meaning stockpiling) product inventory, as device prices begin to rise sharply.
As CCS notes, this casts an ominous shadow on the outlook for the rest of the year, and it seems things have worsened since The Register first started reporting on the smartphone memory woes.
Back in January, the forecast was for handset price rises of 6-8 percent, while the most pessimistic outlook was that the global market might contract as much as 5.2 percent.By February, analysts were expecting to see a decline in shipments of around 8 percent across the global market, and for prices to increase by about 14 percent.
