Apple may be seeing declining growth for iPhone shipments, but overall it looks like an awful lot of smartphones were shipped last year. According to a report from Strategy Analytics, the number hit 1.4 billion in 2015, representing the most smartphones ever shipped in a year.
On the other hand, Strategy Analytics also notes that shipments in the fourth quarter of 2015 were only up 6 percent from the same period a year earlier, which is the slowest growth rate to date… so maybe the market is saturated and sales will continue to drop as the number of people buying their first phone instead of a replacement for an existing one declines.
One thing is certain though: not a lot of those 1.4 billion smartphones that shipped in 2015 were Microsoft Lumia phones.
Microsoft released its fourth quarter financial results, and the company notes that revenue from phones declined by 49 percent. In the last three months of the year. The company sold 4.5 million phones. A year earlier, the number was 10.5 million.
Sure, there are some companies that would probably be ecstatic if they could sell 4.5 million phones. But Microsoft is one of the only companies producing phones that run Windows software, and it seems like the market for those phones is drying up.
There was some good news in Microsoft’s report: revenue from the Surface line of tablets and notebooks was up 29 percent.