China's smart phone shipments will grow by 53% this year

According to IHS iSuppli, a market research organization, smart phone shipments in China will increase by 53% this year due to lower prices and the government’s increased demand for counterfeit products.

IHS iSuppli expects China's domestic smart phone shipments to grow to 54.1 million units this year. The agency believes that ZTE's and Huawei's shipments will reach 10 million and 15 million respectively. Wang Yang, Director of IHS Research Department, said that due to the drop in prices of mobile phones and 3G services, China's domestic smart phone market will achieve strong growth in 2011, and the emergence of mobile Internet application software has also stimulated the consumer demand for smart phones.

IHS expects that in spite of the increase in shipments, China’s cottage and parallel mobile phone market may experience a drop in revenue this year, as the Chinese government’s supervision of such mobile phones in the grey market has increased and the crackdown on counterfeit mobile phones will impact its profits. . This year, the grey market mobile phone shipments should peak around 255 million units and will fall back to 213 million units in 2012.

IHS said that the shipment volume of this smartphone does not include the mobile phones sold by the parallel Apple iPhone and HTC in the Mainland. The total sales volume of these two types of mobile phones last year was approximately 7 million.