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Global Smartphone Market Faces Record Annual Decline as Chip Crunch Worsens

The iPhone 17 series on display at the Apple Store in New York City, US, September 19, 2025. (Reuters)
The iPhone 17 series on display at the Apple Store in New York City, US, September 19, 2025. (Reuters)
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Global Smartphone Market Faces Record Annual Decline as Chip Crunch Worsens

The iPhone 17 series on display at the Apple Store in New York City, US, September 19, 2025. (Reuters)
The iPhone 17 series on display at the Apple Store in New York City, US, September 19, 2025. (Reuters)

The global smartphone market is heading for its steepest annual contraction on record, with shipments projected to slump by 13.9% this year to 1.08 billion units, Counterpoint Research said on Monday, citing a worsening shortage of memory chips.

The forecast is a downgrade from the 12.4% decline projected in February, with the squeeze in global chip supply exacerbated by the Iran war.

IMPACT MOST ACUTE AT BUDGET END OF MARKET

The impact is being felt most acutely in lower-end smartphones as ‌chipmakers shift ‌production capacity to AI-related chips, making entry-level devices less ‌economical ⁠to produce.

Global smartphone wholesale ⁠prices rose 14% in the first quarter while shipments fell 3.1% year on year. That trend is expected to continue as inventory built before the supply shock becomes depleted, with some models priced below $150 likely to disappear from the market.

"Smartphone makers in the low and mid-tier are caught between cost increases they cannot absorb and consumers with limited spending power," said Wang ⁠Yang, a principal analyst at Counterpoint, an independent research ‌company that publishes quarterly smartphone shipment data.

"The ‌question is no longer how to grow shipments or market share, but whether ‌to remain in the market at all."

The memory chip shortage ‌is the most severe supply-side disruption the smartphone industry has faced, Wang said, adding that manufacturers are unable to offset the impact through pricing or product changes.

PREMIUM END OF THE MARKET MORE RESILIENT

The premium segment has proven more resilient. Apple posted ‌record revenue for the first three months of the year, helped by customers upgrading to its iPhone ⁠17 series. ⁠Apple's 2026 shipments are expected to remain flat before rising 5% next year, Counterpoint projections show.

With more stable chip supply and stronger margins than many rivals, Apple is well placed to gain market share and could face less pressure to raise prices.

Samsung Electronics kept volumes steady in the first quarter and is expected by Counterpoint to register only a 4% decline in shipments over the full year, outperforming the wider market thanks to stable supply and a consistent product line-up.

Transsion, which is heavily exposed to the market for smartphones priced below $150, is forecast to suffer a 32% drop in shipments this year. Rivals Xiaomi and Honor, meanwhile, are projected to post full-year declines of 28% and 20% respectively, Counterpoint said.

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Technology

SpaceX: Five Key Moments, from First Launch to Starship Megarocket

SpaceX employees celebrate the company's Wall Street debut, the largest initial public offering in US history. TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP
SpaceX employees celebrate the company's Wall Street debut, the largest initial public offering in US history. TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP
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SpaceX: Five Key Moments, from First Launch to Starship Megarocket

SpaceX employees celebrate the company's Wall Street debut, the largest initial public offering in US history. TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP
SpaceX employees celebrate the company's Wall Street debut, the largest initial public offering in US history. TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP

More than 20 years after its founding, SpaceX made history Friday with its record-high stock market debut, crowning a unique journey marked by dazzling successes but also catastrophic failures and unfulfilled promises.

Here are five key moments in the company's history:

- 2008: The founding myth -

Six years after its founding, SpaceX launched its first rocket into orbit after multiple failures, taking off in September 2008 from a remote archipelago in the Pacific Ocean.

"I messed up the first three launches; the first three launches failed," co-founder Elon Musk recalled years later.

"Fortunately, the fourth launch -- that was the last money that we had -- the fourth launch worked, or that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day."

- 2012: Next stop, ISS -

After the successful launch, SpaceX grew and developed more powerful launchers, including its flagship rocket, Falcon 9, which has become the most widely used rocket today.

Among its creations was the Dragon spacecraft, which docked as a cargo vessel at the International Space Station in 2012, a first by a private company.

Eight years later, the Dragon spacecraft carried its first astronaut to the ISS, beating other aerospace companies like Boeing to becoming the main American transport to the space station.

- 2018: A Tesla in space? -

At the same time, SpaceX in 2015 successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket, ushering in the age of partially reusable rockets.

This was followed by Falcon Heavy, a much more powerful launcher with two Falcon 9 boosters.

To mark its first test flight in 2018, Musk decided to place the car made by one of his other companies, a Tesla, on board.

The image of the red Tesla occupied by a mannequin dubbed Starman -- after David Bowie -- was seen around the world.

Not all SpaceX promises were kept though: that same year, Musk said he would send a group which included Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the Moon by 2023, but that never came to pass.

- 2020-2023: Starbase's explosive beginning -

The tech trillionaire ended up prioritizing the development of his megarocket Starship, designed to travel to the Moon and, eventually, Mars.

To complete the project, he bought vast amounts of land in Texas and developed an industrial complex known as Starbase, where he would launch a series of Starship prototypes, most of which blew up into spectacular fireballs.

Musk justified the "rapid unscheduled disassembly" of these rockets, to use the entrepreneur's favorite euphemism for explosions, by saying they were part of the learning process.

- 2024: The unprecedented 'Super Heavy' catch -

In October 2024, SpaceX succeeded in recovering the first stage of Starship, its "Super Heavy" booster, in a unique maneuver that had never been achieved before.

After launching the spacecraft, the booster detached and began its descent, returning to the SpaceX launch pad where a pair of "chopsticks" reached out to catch the booster and bring it to a halt.

The feat, while impressive, is only the first part of SpaceX's plan to make Starship a fully reusable rocket -- a goal it remains in pursuit of while dealing with several technical challenges.

Technology

India Clears Way for Self-driving, Safety Car Tech to Reduce Road Deaths

A woman crosses street through a dust storm accompanied by rain in Jammu, India, Thursday, June 11, 2026.(AP Photo/Channi Anand)
A woman crosses street through a dust storm accompanied by rain in Jammu, India, Thursday, June 11, 2026.(AP Photo/Channi Anand)
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India Clears Way for Self-driving, Safety Car Tech to Reduce Road Deaths

A woman crosses street through a dust storm accompanied by rain in Jammu, India, Thursday, June 11, 2026.(AP Photo/Channi Anand)
A woman crosses street through a dust storm accompanied by rain in Jammu, India, Thursday, June 11, 2026.(AP Photo/Channi Anand)

India has scrapped a license requirement for radar sensors, freeing automakers to adopt technology that helps cars avoid crashes and drive themselves by sensing surrounding objects, in a bid to make some of the world's deadliest roads safer.

The world's third largest car market, India reported more than 177,000 deaths in nearly half a million ⁠road accidents in 2024, the ⁠latest figures show, according to Reuters.

In a notice on Thursday, the government waived the license requirement for radar sensors operating in the frequency band from 77GHz to 81 GHz. That lets companies ⁠enable the technology without the government having to separately assign the airwaves.

Automakers Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra, stand to benefit from the change, as well the suppliers behind them, such as Germany's Bosch and Continental.

The radar sensors let a car gauge safe distances, and drive features such as emergency braking, adaptive cruise ⁠control ⁠and blindspot warnings, to form a basis for autonomous driving.

The change brings India in line with the United States, the European Union and a global telecoms standard, all of which dedicate the same frequency band to vehicle radar.

That lets carmakers and suppliers tap into the same off-the-shelf hardware worldwide, rather than having to build an India-specific version.

Technology

AI Robot Cleaners Leave the Lab for China's Living Rooms

The service is a baby step towards a future in which robots increasingly take over manual labor from humans. WANG Zhao / AFP
The service is a baby step towards a future in which robots increasingly take over manual labor from humans. WANG Zhao / AFP
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AI Robot Cleaners Leave the Lab for China's Living Rooms

The service is a baby step towards a future in which robots increasingly take over manual labor from humans. WANG Zhao / AFP
The service is a baby step towards a future in which robots increasingly take over manual labor from humans. WANG Zhao / AFP

Beijing cleaner Lin Meiqiong found her work a little easier the day she was paired with an unlikely new colleague -- a tall, wheeled robot with AI-powered tidying skills.

The 56-year-old and her white-and-silver partner, fitted with cameras and two mechanical claws, are part of a new human-robot cleaning service offered by Chinese household help platform 58.com.

It's a baby step towards a future espoused by tech evangelists in which robots increasingly take over manual labor from humans -- though at the moment, such services are largely a data-gathering exercise for companies and a novelty for curious customers.

"It's definitely different," Lin told AFP in between cleaning the kitchen and wiping down windows.

"I used to have to do everything myself," she said. "It's reduced the workload a bit."

The cleaning service, a collaboration between 58.com and Chinese robotics company X Square, costs 149 yuan ($22) for three hours and is available in Beijing and tech hub Shenzhen.

Helped into the apartment by an X Square engineer, the AI-operated Quanta X1 Pro robot uses its cameras to identify areas it could spruce up.

As Lin scrubbed the floor on her knees, it picked up rubbish and folded clothes strewn across a sofa.

Grasping a pair of dark grey trousers, it raised its upper body to stretch the fabric taut, before laying it flat and arranging it into neat halves.

The process took several minutes and resembled a child learning to fold clothes for the first time.

Future iterations of the robot will respond to voice commands and even be able to chat, said the engineer, Hu Bowen.

- 'Better than a lab' -

Around 200 households have booked the service since it was rolled out in March.

Tan Pei, who works in advertising and booked the robot to clean her Beijing flat, said she had chosen the service because she was interested to "see what it could do".

"Even though it's not that perfect, there are still parts of it that surprised me," such as folding a pair of trousers "quite well", she said.

China's robots have wowed audiences with fluid dancing and set-piece martial arts displays onstage, but their application and performance in real-life settings remains limited.

For companies like X Square, the logic of launching an imperfect service lies in data collection for so-called embodied artificial intelligence.

Unlike large language models trained on vast quantities of internet content, robots lack comparable real-world datasets.

"We don't have a robot internet yet," Christoforos Mavrogiannis from the University of Michigan told AFP.

"It is much more informative to put the robot out there and study what happens than staying forever in the lab."

X Square engineer Hu said he sends his robots to work in a "completely unfamiliar environment".

"That is very challenging, but this unfamiliar data is also very helpful for the robot's growth."

As investment into embodied AI booms, similar trials in China include robots directing traffic in cities like Hangzhou or working on factory floors.

On the domestic help front, firm GigaAI also plans to deploy 100 humanoid robots into households in central Wuhan this autumn for free home-service trials.

Investors have poured more than 57.7 billion yuan ($8.5 billion) into China's embodied AI industry so far this year, already soaring past the total for last year as a whole, according to business database ITjuzi.

- 'Very elementary stage' -

But a myriad of hurdles stand in the way of widespread deployment.

As the Quanta X1 Pro's clothes folding demonstrated, robots still can't match human dexterity.

"Even though many companies are working on building better hands and building autonomy for hands, we don't have that yet," the University of Michigan's Mavrogiannis said.

There are multiple regulatory issues even once the physical capability is there.

Privacy will become a big issue, as robots would have access to huge amounts of personal data.

"We don't know where that data is going, where it's located... who is looking at that information," said Valeria Alessandra Macalupu Chira from Queensland University of Technology.

The safety of clients and their homes is another unresolved issue.

"I think we are still at a very elementary stage," said Yang Jianfei from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

Robots currently require supervision by humans who can activate emergency stop functions, he noted, and there are not yet recognized industry-wide safety standards.

Experts agree broad adoption seems a long way off.

Asked whether she thought robots would revolutionize her industry, cleaner Lin did not seem too concerned.

"Compared with people, it's obviously still not quite there," she said. "After all, it's a robot."