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Smartphone users worldwide will number 5.4 billion by 2020, according to analyst firm.
Despite slowing headline growth rates, there are still big opportunities in the mobile phone market, analyst firm CCS Insight said on Tuesday, predicting that more than 2 billion new smartphone owners will emerge over the next five years.
The company predicts that total smartphone users will number 5.4 billion by 2020, up from 3.1 billion last year.
New figures from CCS Insight suggest smartphone sales will reach 1.5 billion units globally this year, rising to 2 billion units in 2020.
Its 2016 estimate is identical to one shared by Gartner last week, but Gartner puts shipments at 2.02 billion by as early as 2018.
Smartphone growth will be fuelled in no small part by sales in India and other emerging markets in the Asia-Pacific region, where 220 million units will be sold this year, CCS Insight said. Sales in Africa will reach 85 million units.
LTE-capable phones are becoming more common, with shipments more than doubling to 900 million units last year, including 317 million in China alone.
"LTE momentum shows no signs of abating," said Jasdeep Badyal, smart devices analyst at CCS Insight
"In 2016 we expect LTE-capable devices to account for 50% of all smartphone shipments, and we expect that to rise to 72% of the market by 2020," he said.
Overall, 2.2 billion mobile phones will be sold worldwide in 2020, up from 2.04 billion this year, but as the aforementioned figures show, smartphones will dominate while feature phones take a back seat. Feature phone sales will decline to 240 million units by 2020 from 550 million in 2016.
Nonetheless, "this opportunity remains interesting enough for a number of phone makers to continue to deliver products, albeit with ever-declining profit margins," CCS Insight said.
