Sony, which makes all of the iPhone camera sensors, has now effectively said that it thinks iPhone sales won’t grow this year. This marks a change to its previous view that the smartphone market would recover in the second half of this year.
The company said that demand for smartphones is slowing in China, and worsening in the US – echoing Apple’s own warning not to expect growth from the iPhone 15 launch …
Apple has recently said iPhone sales won’t grow
AAPL last week reported revenue down 1% year-on-year, due to a difficult smartphone market, and warned that it doesn’t expect things to change this quarter, when the iPhone 15 lineup is launched.
Looking ahead, Maestri said yesterday that Apple was expecting the current quarter to be similar, so roughly flat year-on-year.
“We expect our September quarter year-over-year revenue performance to be similar to the June quarter, assuming that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter.”
Sony now shares Apple’s pessimism
In offering its own guidance, Sony had previously said that it expected to benefit from a bounce-back in the smartphone market in the second half of this year – that is, when the iPhone 15 goes on sale.
However, Bloomberg reports that the company has now changed its mind.
“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.”
Top comment by Publius
I think the bigger issue is that the iPhone updates are very minor and iterative at this point, and we’re on the 4th year of (the dynamic island gimmick not withstanding) the same design, and you need to spend around $1k to upgrade to get these minor updates.
Think of laptops/computers. I used to update these every couple of years because the technology improved so much. But I kept a late 2013 MBP in service until 2021, buying a 16in M1 MBP. I don’t anticipate replacing it until around 2030. What did I miss out on? Some speed, battery, and touchbar.
Say you bought an IPhone13 two years ago. What do you really miss out on from skipping iPhone15? A single year processor bump, dynamic island and a few other small things. Maybe it will be worth updating when FaceID is under the screen, if you like that aesthetic. But your phone is still great and can basically do all of the things this year’s model will do. And with each passing year of iterative upgrades, the need for the buyers of that generation to upgrade for a feature related reason in the future is going to decline.
It has also been reported that Sony has been experiencing yield issues with the sensors for this year’s iPhone lineup, likely due to the more challenging requirements of manufacturing the 48MP sensor, which is expected to come to the base and Plus models this year.
Sony didn’t comment on this, but one analyst commented that its sensor unit has been unable to make a profit this year, which is almost certainly partly due to this problem.
“The unit hasn’t been able to make profits,” Morningstar analyst Kazunori Ito said. “We need to pay close attention to the unit going forward.”
Things may get even challenging next year, when it likely introduces a more advanced sensor to roughly double the low-light capabilities of the iPhone 16.
Photo: TheRegisti/Unsplash
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