Smartphone boom about to bust?

Thanks for the heads-up Roger.

Then again -- perhaps RoBoHon will pick up some new market.

From Yahoo Finance -- more at the source.

We have a situation where market saturation is happening. (There are 7 billion people on earth, and 1.4 billion smart phones sold annually -- 2015 numbers -- so one in six people on earth last year got a new smartphone. Expecting them to be a little bit durable -- that's nearly total penetration of the possible market.)

The smartphone boom is about to go bust, with sales growth expected to fall to single digits in 2016. That’s a far cry from the 73% growth the industry saw just six years ago.

According to market research group Gartner Inc., worldwide smartphone sales will increase by just 7% in 2016. IDC Research, meanwhile, predicts growth will slow to just 3.1%.

>>>> Of course, that's 98,000,000 more smartphones than were sold last year, if you consider the 1.4 billion sold last year. <<<<

Why such a precipitous drop? Simply put, because consumers already have too many smartphones in their hands. Smartphone markets in North America, Europe, Japan and more mature Asia and Pacific markets have already reached 90% penetration, according to Gartner. That’s a lot of smartphones.

To try to counteract this trend, some US carriers and handset makers are taking steps to get consumers interested in purchasing phones at a faster clip. Gartner, for example, points to Apple’s buyback program that lets you get a new handset after having your phone for a year. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon offer similar upgrade programs.

But without a fundamental shift in smartphone design or function, the market will likely continue to see minimal growth going forward.

>>>> Bring on PicoP -- which can lead to a fundamental shift in smartphone design and cause a market boom that the industry is craving. <<<<