

Cell Phone Shipments No Longer Growing - transburgh
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/01/26/cell-phone-shipments-no-longer-growing/

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dimitar
Everyone has a mobile phone these days, even in much of the poorest countries.

Most people nowadays have owned half a dozen phones and have developed taste
and higher expectations. Most people here even use two phones concurrently
(for each of the carriers, basically an economic cartel issue). You don't have
many people left around here to arm with mobile phones. So now

Perhaps phone makers will try to improve their phones, make them more usable,
more extensive, more compatible, with better batteries, better in every way to
convince customers to buy new ones.

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otoburb
This shouldn't be surprising given the massive growth that has been
experienced. Mobile operators can only experiment so far with $0 pre-paid
phones before hitting a wall of economic reality and/or limits of their
(planned?) revenue models.

Growth typically cannot continue at rapid double-digit rates. At some point,
we have to be able to deal with what's already been distributed so that
consumers learn to work with what they already have.

Carriers have typically gravitated toward post-paid (especially in North
America) because of the warm, fuzzy recurring/regular revenue figures that
they can project against (investors love recurring regaularity).

This resulted in carriers subsidizing handsets and attempting to shorten the
upgrade cycle in the hopes of keeping customers on their post-paid plans for
as long as possible.

Customers can't afford to keep upgrading. Similar logic applies to pre-paid
handsets. Expect to see a decline in "disposable" pre-paid phone packages,
depending on how desperate your local/regional carriers become.

