Smart-phone sales gather pace

The take-up in the still developing market has more than doubled from just one in every five handsets less than two years ago to more than two in five or 42 per cent of units sold in the last 12 months.
According to GfK’s latest findings, the momentum started picking up at the beginning of last year with consumers spending over US$800 million (Bt24.9 billion) in the past year.
Although basic phones continue to make up the larger proportion of purchases, demand has been waning, with sale volume dropping by over 11 per cent in the past year. Revenue for the segment has lunged by 38 per cent, accounting for just over 15 per cent of the handset market compared to 40 per cent previously.
“Consumer demand for handsets has been growing every quarter since the second quarter of 2012, inflating the volume and value of the market considerably by 23 and 61 per cent in the past 12 months,” Wichit Purepong, managing director of GfK in Thailand, said yesterday.
“This growth has been purely contributed by smartphones, which registered the greatest spike of 24 per cent in sales volume in the first quarter of this year over the quarter before.”
Intensified demand for smartphones is generally seen across the country but the fastest growth has been reported in the Northeast. In the first four months of this year, smartphone unit sales across the 17 provinces here more than quadrupled (344 per cent) compared to the year before, far exceeding the momentum in the central and western regions, which reported only 17 per cent and 11 per cent growth.
“Although the northeast region is the largest in population and size, it is the least developed and has the lowest average income in Thailand. And the low wage has propelled some of the natives here to head out to other parts of the country to find better paying jobs,” Wichit said.
“However, the establishment of industrial estates after the heavy flooding of 2011 has attracted the labour force back to the Northeast, fuelling higher demand, in this case for smartphones, since the middle of last year,” he said.
Yet another reason for the strong growth in the Northeast is the availability of more smartphone models matching the lower purchasing power of the local population. While the average price of a smartphone was $300 in the most affluent area of Greater Bangkok, it was around $230 in the Northeast.
“In the last year, basic feature phones still made up the dominant segment, but this trend will soon be reversed, ” he said. “