Global phone shipments plunge most ever as consumers spend less

Global smartphone shipments suffered their worst quarterly drop on record in a clear sign of cooling consumer demand that signals more pain for manufacturing hubs like South Korea and Vietnam.

Shipments declined 18.3% in the December quarter compared to a year earlier, to a little over 300 million units, Needham, Massachusetts-based IDC said Thursday. For the year, shipments fell 11.3% and marked the lowest total for a decade, the researchers said.

“We have never seen shipments in the holiday quarter come in lower,” Nabila Popal, research director at IDC, said in a press release. Along with inflation and economic uncertainties, Covid lockdowns in China were another factor that hurt the industry, including sales of Apple Inc.’s iPhone, she said.