What’s the Biggest Global Market for Smartphones?

After experiencing a downturn in 2020, global markets rebounded with consumers feeling safer spending their money on various items that might appeal to them. A strong indicator of the fact that markets are returning to normal is the fact that the Mobile World Congress came back in the summer of 2021 after having been canceled in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The event limited in person attendance but it still managed to have 20,000 people coming in, and 100,000 people joined the event digitally.

This is more or less in line with the 100,000 in person attendees that the event had come to expect in years prior, and it revealed a fair bit about what the biggest smartphone markets in the world are. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Asia appears to have the highest number of smartphone users which obviously makes it the single biggest market out there, although it should also be factored in that China is leading the pack.

China alone has around 953 million smartphone users, followed by India at a distant second with 492 million users. When you factor in Indonesia’s 170 million smartphone users, it’s easy to see why companies like Apple are focusing so much on entering the Asian market. China in particular is going to be a pretty massive prize for Apple because its total smartphone user base is expected to cross 1 billion by next year or perhaps the year after that with all things having been considered and taken into account.

By comparison, the US has around 273 million smartphone users which brings it to third place. However, China’s total user count exceeds that of India, the US as well as Indonesia even if you were combine all of their users into a single entity. This might make China an even bigger focus for smartphone companies but that might be a difficult nut to crack due to China’s own robust smartphone ecosystem with several local companies already successfully operating within it and expanding outwards as well to countries in its vicinity and beyond.


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