The growth momentum in global smartphone market will remain weak in 2018 due to lower demand and less replacement purchases, says TrendForce. Faced with continuous rise in the costs of upstream components, downstream mobile phone vendors have to re-consider the pricing or adjust the specification of end-products to cope with the cost pressures. The distribution of market share among the major players is expected to remain generally the same as last year. Therefore, TrendForce estimates the global smartphone production for 2018 at around 1.5 billion units, a 2.8% annual growth only, down from previously expected 5%.
Market research firm TrendForce reports that the global notebook shipments for 2017 registered 164.7 million units, a year-on-year increase of 2.1%, higher than previous expectation of 0.7%.
Apple’s upcoming launch of HomePod has intensified the competition in smart speaker market. According to TrendForce, Amazon Echo still tops the ranking of smart speaker products in 2018 with a market share in shipment of 50.8%, although down from 69.1% in 2017. The share of Google Home is projected at 21.6%, ranking the 2nd. The new Apple HomePod is expected to reach a share of 8.9%, while the numbers for Alibaba’s and Xiaomi's smart speakers will be 6.3% and 5.1% respectively.
According to the latest report of WitsView, a division of TrendForce, global shipments of branded LCD TV sets for 2017 totaled 211 million units, a decrease of 4.1% compared with prior year. This is a new low since 2014, indicating a bottleneck in the development of TV industry. In 2018, TV brands will focus on large-size, high-resolution products, and also develop high-end products like QLED and OLED TVs, hoping to push sales and regain profits by specifications upgrade.
According to the latest report by WitsView, a division of TrendForce, the shipments of gaming monitor (with a frame rate above 100Hz) recorded about 2.5 million units in 2017, an annual growth of 80%. TrendForce forecasts that the shipments will increase by another 1 million units this year, totaling around 3.5 to 3.7 million units in 2018.
