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| Chart A |
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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.
Nielsen has already noted that more than half of US consumers have smartphones. comScore’s data seems to point to that threshold being crossed sometime this year. Horace Dediu of Asymco plotted the time it took for a set of technologies to reach 50% penetration of US households in the chart B
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