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What is a company to do when its market nears saturation? Mobile phone manufacturers are slowly realizing this dilemma. After years of double-digit increases, including 12.4 percent in 2007, we might start seeing single digit increases for the next few years. Hey, when you have lots of people buying expensive smartphones, they’re not going to want to upgrade so soon. And so you have people hanging onto phones for two, three years, when they were more apt to purchase a new phone every year before we started seeing handsets get in the $600 range.

“The expectation that the market would maintain the level of growth it saw over the last three years was unrealistic,” said Ryan Reith, IDC senior analyst, in a statement. “We expect growth to be in the single digits throughout 2008, and most likely for years to follow.”

As usual, Nokia dominated the mobile phone market in the fourth quarter, shipping out 1.5 million handsets, which was 40 percent of the entire market — more than the Nos. 2, 3 and 4 manufacturers combined.

Samsung took over the No. 2 spot, shipping 13.9 percent of the market, while former No. 2 Motorola was a tick behind at 12.2 percent. Sony Ericsson was next at 9.2 percent, and LG was fifth at 7.1 percent.

Over 1.144 billion phones were shipped in 2007, so here’s to guessing that the 2008 number will dip below a billion. It won’t make marketers and execs happy. But hey, you can’t expect exponential growth forever. The mobile industry will still be strong, no doubt. It just won’t be the unstoppable juggernaut it has been for the past few years.

[Information Week]

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