Smartphone shipments in China have actually shrunk by 22%

With all these reports about the exploding smartphone market in China, you’d think there’d be nothing but massive growth all year round, but apparently that’s not the case. According to the Chinese Academy of Information and Communication, mobile phone shipments in China actually dropped by almost 22% in 2014 from the year prior.

The number of phones shipped in China fell 21.9 percent in 2014 from the previous year, according to the Chinese Academy of Information and Communication (CAICT). 452 million mobile phones – including both feature phones and smartphones – were shipped to domestic retailers last year, compared to 579 million in 2013. Note that this study only measures new shipments, so China’s mobile subscriber base is still growing on the whole, but now at a slower clip. An earlier report from Emarketer says China has 519.7 million active smartphone users, and that figure will rise to 574.2 million this year. By 2018, half of the country’s population will own a smartphone – over 700 million people in total.