” Artificial intelligence. » Impossible to walk 20 meters in the aisles of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona without reading these two magic words on an exhibitor’s stand. At the high mass of mobile telephony, which takes place from Monday February 26 to Thursday February 29, this new technology arouses all hopes for reviving a struggling smartphone market.
Among the major brands present, Samsung presented its S24 – released at the end of January – which, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), offers, among other things, instant speech translation. Honor for her part – who had invited The world at its presentation – unveiled its Magic 6 Pro, within which AI should make it possible to anticipate a user’s wishes and allow them to always have the right application just one click away. The smartphone must “understand user intentions”, explains Stephen Zhou, general manager at Honor France. Finally, at Xiaomi, AI makes it possible, for example, to complete the contours of an image.
To think that AI imposes a revolution in the field of smartphones, as certain manufacturers insist, is excessive. AI has long been integrated into devices, here to recognize a product in a photo that you would like to buy, there to control your device by voice.
Market recovery in 2024
For manufacturers, it is a question of finding new arguments to convince consumers to renew their equipment, as they had tried to do previously with the introduction of 5G, then the launch of the first folding phones – which we now found with almost all manufacturers.
And this, while the market is going through a violent downturn with global sales falling, from one year to the next, by 12% in 2022, then by 5% in 2023. A decline which can be explained by the already very high equipment rate of the population, a post-Covid effect – consumers having massively re-equipped during the pandemic – and inflation which weighed on purchasing power and lengthened the duration of renewal cycles some products. However, in a common opinion of analysts from IDC, Gartner and Canalys, the market should finally revive in 2024, with growth estimated at around 3%, which should remain moderate in the years to come.
For IDC, this rebound is primarily driven by strong demand in emerging markets, and, much more anecdotally, by the boom in foldable smartphones (+ 37% expected between 2023 and 2024, but for only 25 million pieces in 2024 out of an expected total of 1.2 billion smartphones shipped).
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