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The arrival of the iPhone 15 line won’t help the slowdown in the smartphone market. Sony, Apple’s camera sensor supplier, admits that its earlier prediction that the condition would improve soon might be impossible, saying it could happen next year instead. This spells trouble for Apple.
To recall, earlier reports indicated that Apple had huge expectations for the iPhone 15 series this year, with the company hoping to introduce around 85 million units in this calendar year. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives corroborated this in a Forbes report, which stressed that “approximately 250 million iPhones have not been upgraded in over four years.” It should translate to a vast population of iPhone buyers for Apple, ensuring the success of the iPhone 15 line. This earlier prediction came despite the challenging climate in the smartphone market, and Sony made the same claims earlier. According to the Japanese company at that time, it predicted that smartphone sales around the globe would bounce back in the second half of this fiscal year. However, it has now significantly changed its prediction, saying the recovery could instead happen in 2024 due to market issues in the US and China.
Bloomberg reports:
“The recovery of the smartphone market in China is slower than we expected and conditions in the US market are worsening,” Sadahiko Hayakawa, a senior general manager for finance, told analysts at a briefing. “We had expected the smartphone market to start recovering from the second half of this fiscal year, but now we expect that would not happen until at least the next year.”
Sony’s statement carries significant weight over the matter, given the company is the superior camera sensor supplier for smartphones around the globe. If this is what will indeed happen in the coming months, Apple’s iPhone 15 sales in September onwards might face disappointing numbers, especially in the mentioned markets by Sony. And given the US and China (the UK, Japan, and India being the rest) are two of the biggest iPhone markets for Apple, predictions like this can lead to huge negative impacts on the company’s smartphone sales in the coming quarters.
