"Science and Technology Innovation Board**" on January 10It is slightly different from the market's general view of the demand for Android phones in 2024, consumer electronics analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in an article todayThe inventory replenishment of major Android phone brands starting in 2023Q3 is expected to end in January 2024.
Ming-Chi Kuo said that the near-term transaction risk may come from the market's expectation that the demand structure will improve after the inventory is replenished, and many mobile phone industry-related **previous** also reflect this expectation. WhileJudging from the changes in shipment estimates and order visibility, the improvement in demand for Android phones may be lower than market expectations
Whether it is a Chinese or non-Chinese market, the order visibility has been shortened from 4-6 months in 2H23 to about 2 months in 1H24, which shows that brand manufacturers are conservative about the follow-up market demand; At present, the shipment estimates of low-end mobile phones in the non-Chinese market have begun to be revised downward, and the orders are generally in the double digits, and the local brands in emerging markets even have more than 40 to 50% of the orders.
However, Ming-Chi Kuo thinksEven if there is no structural improvement in the demand for Android phones, there is limited room for downward revision
Looking back on 2023, in the second half of the year, driven by new machines such as the Mate 60, Chinese smartphones will usher in a wave of long-lost "Xiaoyangchun". The current wave of inventory replenishment for Android phones began in May July. After Huawei launched the Mate 60 Pro at the end of August, it increased its procurement of parts due to better-than-expected demand, and competitors followed suit to ensure that there were enough parts, which in turn pushed up inventory replenishment.
Judging from the data released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, from September to November 2023, the shipments of the domestic mobile phone market exceeded the average monthly shipments of the whole year, with a year-on-year increase of .3%。
According to the statistics of China Merchants**, benefiting from the improvement of inventories and the recovery of emerging markets, the year-on-year decline in global mobile phone shipments in 23Q3 narrowed to -01%；23M8 M12 domestic Android phone sales ushered in a positive year-on-year turn, mainly benefiting from Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, vivo and other new machine drives; Apple's new iPhone 15 global sales performance is solid.
Overall, the industry chain generally believes that mobile phone shipments will decline by single digits in 2023, and a weak recovery is expected in 2024. Merchants ** said,In 2023H2, the demand for mobile phone market will recover marginally month-on-month, and the weak recovery in 2024 will focus on pattern changes and AI innovationAI applications may become the next breakthrough in mobile phone innovation, generative AI is gradually landing on the device side, and mobile phones equipped with large models are gradually coming out; CDB** also said that traditional terminals are expected to generate more new demand under the empowerment of AI.