A new research report from Berg Insight has calculated that worldwide shipments of smartphones increased 74% last year to 295 million units. The number of smartphone users increased by 38% year-on-year to an estimated 470 million people.
Shipment volumes are expected to continue increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 32.4%, reaching 1.2 billion units in 2015 - and the number of smartphone users is expected to grow at a CAGR of 42.9% to reach 2.8 billion in 2015.
Berg Insight says most growth will come from medium and low-end smartphones.
André Malm, Senior Analyst at Berg Insight, said “Chipset developers and handset vendors are working on technologies that will ensure a good user experience also for low cost smartphones. The challenge is to develop a handset with enough memory, graphics performance and processing power to run the operating system with multiple applications while ensuring a responsive system with fluid user interface and still keep costs down”.