The Trillion-Dollar Smartphone Economy

Over the past decade, the smartphone market has seen unprecedented growth, resulting in hundreds of billions in sales annually. Smartphones have turned Apple into the trillion-dollar company it is today and put companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi on the map internationally. But there’s more to the smartphone’s success story than “just” hardware sales.

As Deloitte points out in its TMT Predictions 2020 report, out today, the smartphone’s rise has enabled numerous other industries to generate billions of dollars in sales each year. The so-called “smartphone multiplier”, i.e. products and services depending on smartphone ownership, is expected to drive $459 billion in global sales next year, just shy of the $484 billion Deloitte predicts in actual smartphone sales.

According to Deloitte, the smartphone multiplier comprises of a wide array of products and services, including hardware (e.g. cases, chargers, audio accessories, wearables), content (e.g. mobile ads, streaming subscriptions and most importantly apps) and services (e.g. repairs, insurance, cloud storage), and could soon eclipse actual handset sales as the biggest revenue driver in the smartphone economy.