Measured smartphone and 5G shipments in 2020, give it a thumbs up
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account ” Science and Technology said “(ID: kejishuo) , author: old iron 007.
In the mobile phone industry, the following judgments are circulating in the 2020 market: With the launch of 5G commercial use, the sales of 5G mobile phones in 2020 will not only stimulate the industry’s shipments, but also stabilize the market share for mobile phone manufacturers, or turn corners. A great opportunity to overtake, especially for companies such as Xiaomi, which have been longer than internationalization for some time, and their domestic share has declined.
In this article, we will use the data as the main basis to analyze and predict the smartphone market in 2020, and then judge how significant the 5G concept is to mobile phone manufacturers, and whether the current market structure has changed, loosened, or even disrupted. opportunity.
5G mobile phones in 2020: it looks beautiful and the market is hard to break out
For the prediction of 5G mobile phones in China in 2020, different institutions have different results, ranging from tens of millions to even hundreds of millions. We may wish to make our own judgment based on basic data.
First introduce the judgment basis: Since both networks use cities as the primary market, we take the initial development path of 4G as a sample and use the conversion rate of 4G base station coverage as a reference to predict the user conversion brought by the initial construction of 5G base stations. .
The academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Mr. He Heji, stated in 2018 that “5G will require more dense base stations, and the number of 5G base stations will be 4-5 times that of 4G”, that is, regardless of the technical details of different operators using different frequency bands, The coverage area of a 5G single base station is roughly 4-5 times that of 4G. Considering that China has accelerated urbanization migration in recent years, and the concentration of residents has increased, based on the above analysis, we may wish to set the user conversion rate of 5G single base stations optimistically. One third of 4G.
Finish the following data-
The data comes from the official website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
In the first two years of the initial 4G, single base station coverage users showed a rapid growth momentum. Considering the importance of 5G by countries, operators and mobile phone manufacturers, and the technical advantages of 5G in terms of crowd coverage, we set the number of base station coverage users. For the top grid of 220/3, that is, in 2020, a single 5G base station will convert 73 users.
According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and CCTV, the scale of 5G base stations nationwide will be around 700,000 in 2020. Combined with the analysis of the previous analysis, the scale of 5G users in 2020 will be around 52 million.
In 2019, the number of 5G mobile phone shipments in the country was 13 million. It can be roughly estimated that the number of 5G mobile phone shipments in 2020 will be around 40 million.
Is the above analysis objective and rigorous? The following cross-validation can be done.
We have collected and sorted the relevant data of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on mobile users since 2013, see the figure below
The above units are “billion households”
In 2019, China’s mobile phone shipments were 16.131 million 2G mobile phones, 58,000 3G mobile phones, 359 million 4G mobile phones, and 13.769 million 5G mobile phones.
After observing the data, we found that the shipment of 4G mobile phones is roughly as follows: the number of existing handset replacements in the previous year + new mobile users + 2G and 3G conversion-5G increment = 359 million units.
We roughly estimate the above formula, and the replacement ratio is about 20% every year. Using this value to verify 2018, the error is also within a reasonable range.
Combined with this calculation result, we make the following summary of the above data:
An important reason for the vigorous development of 1.4G mobile phones is that on the one hand, the huge conversion stock of 2G feature phones has dropped from more than 800 million to more than 200 million, which is equivalent to a large reservoir of 4G, and the total scale of 3G is 4.85. The peak of 100 million and the penetration rate of mobile users around 30% means that the 3G network has not been completely successful in China, which has given 4G an excellent growth soil; on the other hand, due to factors such as mobile phone price reductions and operator package discounts, etc. , The number of mobile users increased by more than 300 million from 2013 to 2019, and the vast majority converted to 4GUsers;
2. Affected by external influences such as roaming fee cancellation, number portability, and total user size, the number of mobile users will increase by only 30 million in 2019, which also indicates that the mobile phone industry is constantly influencing the population of new users. Dividends are diminishing;
3. In the 5G era, although operators and manufacturers are emphasizing the fast speed of the network, no new applications suitable for the 5G era have been found on mobile phone applications. Compared with short videos, mobile social networking, and mobile games, they are based on 4G development. In the short term, 5G has not seen applications different from 4G at the application level. In other words, the “surprise” of 5G at the mobile application level is relatively insufficient, which will limit its overall increase.
In 2020, as the scale of 700,000 5G base stations is still in its infancy, although operators have stated that they want to cover all prefecture-level cities, because the single base station radiation is about 0.3 meters, the total coverage area is relatively limited, making it possible to cover urban areas. However, most urban residents will not be able to fully enjoy the 5G network in 2020, which will also limit the continuous growth of 5G users after the demand for “early adopters.”
In addition, the cost of 5G base stations is high. According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the initial electricity cost of a single base station is 3-4 times that of 4G. Under the premise of the small number of existing users, the amortization cost of a single user is too large. If there are no external conditions such as capital and finance, it will be difficult to reduce package costs in the short term.
That is to say, at the maturity of non-functional machine reservoirs and applications, the development efficiency of the early stage of 5G will not exceed the 4G stage too much. The ideal scale of 52 million we analyzed earlier should theoretically be able to withstand Deliberated.
So, what about the growth of smartphone users in 2020?
According to the 4G sales scale growth formula, it can be predicted like this
Annual sales of smartphones = 5G sales scale + 4G sales scale = new mobile subscribers + 2G and 3G transfers + 20% replacement ratio of 4G in the previous year
If the number of newly added users is set at 20 million (this is also the annual growth of WeChat, which is roughly at this scale), 3G mobile phones will only sell 58,000 in 2019, indicating that the existing market of the network has been rapidly lost and conservative stocks Set at 20 million households, 2G is used by specific populations, and its total scale is set at around 200 million.
Then annual sales of smartphones = 5G sales + 4G sales = 20 million + 90 million + 12.8 * 20% = 376 million units
Among them, 5G is around 40 million units, and 4G mobile phones are more than 300 million.
The above statistical analysis is based on the industry scale and subjective speculation, and it is inevitable that there is a deviation, but we believe that its trend and overall situation should be relatively accurate.
China Telecom and Strategy Analytics have predicted that the global 5G user scale will be in the range of 160 million to 1.7 in 2020.