China Smartphone Sales Drop 55%, Thanks To Coronavirus. But E-Commerce And Delivery Businesses Are Booming
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Graph: China smartphone sales over the past 14 months. Coronavirus has chopped unit sales in half. China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. Article by John Koetsier.
Data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a research institute that is part of the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, says that smartphone sales dropped 56% in February 2020 compared to data from 2019.
The only conceivable rationale? Coronavirus. Or, more specifically, the quarantines and closures related to it. The 56% drop in February follows a 38.9% drop in January and a 14.7% drop in December. And, truth be told, smartphone sales in China — as in the rest of the world — have been slowing for most of a year now. The last monthly increase was in May of 2019, and that was only 1.2% in the positive. This is not surprising, as public life in China has largely shut down in response to the coronavirus panic. […]