Source: Zhitong Finance

According to the latest statistics from IDC, the world's top market tracking agency, the global consumer electronics giant$Apple (AAPL.US)$iPhone shipments fell sharply by nearly 10% in the first quarter of this year, falling steadily at a time when the global smartphone industry as a whole showed a clear rebound.

According to IDC statistics, shipments in the global mobile phone market increased to 289.4 million units, an increase of about 7.8% over the same period last year. Among them, Samsung Electronics (Samsung Electronics) regained the top spot. Brand Transsion (Transsion), which focuses on the budget, achieved a sharp 85% increase in shipments, and Xiaomi's first-quarter data also rebounded, completely narrowing the gap with Apple (Apple), which ranked second.

Since launching the latest iPhone series in September last year, Apple, headquartered in Cupertino (Cupertino), California, has been struggling to maintain sales growth in China, the world's largest smartphone market, and similar problems with Apple devices are affecting its global performance. According to preliminary data from IDC, shipments of the Apple iPhone series were drastically reduced by about 5 million units compared to the same period last year.

“The smartphone market is emerging from the turbulent trend of the past two years and is becoming stronger, but there have also been significant changes.” Nabila Popal (Nabila Popal), head of research at IDC, said. “Although the top two mobile phone manufacturers both showed negative growth data in the first quarter, Samsung Electronics' overall position appears to be stronger than in recent quarters.”

IDC researchers also found that the global average selling price of smartphones is rising as consumers increasingly choose high-end smartphone models they intend to use for a longer period of time. Apple's iPhone 15 Pro, the flagship smartphone device, is likely to sell at a higher rate, resulting in higher revenue per unit. However, the company also had to take unusual discount measures to stimulate sales growth, and some retail partners in China lowered the regular price by about $180.

After smartphone shipments fell by about 4% in 2023, Canalys, another well-known market research agency, predicts that the global smartphone market is expected to recover moderately in 2024, and shipments are expected to increase 4% to 1.17 billion units in 2024.

Will AI smartphones become Apple's “game breaker”?

Samsung Electronics announced a sharp rebound in initial profit for the first quarter of 2024 in early April, reflecting improvements in the company's key semiconductor division and strong sales of Galaxy S24 smartphones. According to the data, the world's largest memory chip manufacturer announced an initial operating profit of about 6.6 trillion won (4.9 billion US dollars), a year-on-year increase of 931.3%. Analysts expected 5.37 trillion won. This increase ended a continuous quarterly decline that began in the third quarter of 2022.

Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, a top Wall Street investment agency, predicts that in terms of its artificial intelligence development opportunities, Apple's user base of more than 2 billion system installation users brings the “best” opportunity in the world. Ives believes that Apple's upcoming global WWDC in June will be a “critical moment” for the company's AI ambitions, and the analyst expects Apple to make the leap forward in AI smartphones with the iPhone 16 scheduled to launch in September this year.

“When it comes to artificial intelligence, they don't just look outside. This is one of the sites with the highest number of system installers in the world, and this is a critical moment for Apple to announce its artificial intelligence strategy.” Ives display.

With the development of AI technology, integrating more powerful AI model functions into smartphones has become a mainstream trend in the technology industry. At the same time, the industry is also actively addressing challenges related to this, such as the massive data processing capability, energy efficiency, storage limitations, and privacy protection of dedicated AI chips.

Currently, leading smartphone hardware manufacturers are developing their own big models, and they are implanting large end models that can operate offline into the next generation of models to create so-called “AI big model smartphones.” Compared to the general-purpose AI model that uses cloud computing power, the large endside local model allows smartphone users to use similar products such as ChatGPT more efficiently, conveniently, and safely. However, it is not easy to apply big AI models to smartphones. Not only do they have to take into account issues such as large model parameters, AI experience, and mobile phone energy consumption, but they also have to bear the cost investment scale of several billion yuan per year from implementation to iteration. This is also a huge test of the manufacturer's hard power.

However, “AI big model phones” will bring great value to users and smartphone manufacturers: first, in the context of lack of user switching power, AI models will become an important bargaining chip for mobile phone manufacturer market competition, and will also be the most important technical means of increasing future sales expectations; second, AI models are expected to become exclusive superassistants customized for every smartphone user in the future, revolutionizing the user experience of smartphones and even all consumer electronics application terminals.

In order to achieve large models of AI running on smartphones, some smartphone hardware manufacturers are studying the integration of dedicated AI processors. These proprietary AI chips are specially designed to handle AI tasks efficiently, and strive to improve computational efficiency and energy consumption ratio. Manufacturers are also striving to use a combination of cloud computing and edge computing to complete some complex AI processing in the cloud, process real-time or sensitive tasks locally, and explore the use of techniques such as model pruning, quantification, and knowledge distillation to reduce the actual scale and computational requirements of large models, making them suitable for operation on resource-limited application equipment terminals.

According to forecast data from Counterpoint Research, a well-known market research agency, it is estimated that by the end of 2027, AI smartphones with built-in generative artificial intelligence functions will be shipped to exceed 500 million units. Counterpoint expects 2024 to be the key year for global AI smartphones, but it is estimated that shipments will reach only 100 million units, but the agency expects the AI smartphone market to grow at a compound annual rate of 83% between 2023-2027.

edit/lambor