Time to Upgrade Your Old Phone? More Consumers Say, ‘Not Yet’

Global smartphone shipments fell nearly 9% in the second quarter, as inflation worries outweigh the urge to get the latest phone

The global smartphone market is taking a breather.

With inflation lifting the cost of daily necessities like gasoline and food, many phone owners are sticking with their current models longer, according to industry executives. Companies are making fewer phones and fewer phone parts, and they are planning for a further rough patch ahead.

China’s Xiaomi Corp., the world’s third-largest smartphone maker after Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., said Friday that it shipped 26% fewer smartphones in the April-to-June quarter compared with a year earlier, and smartphone-related revenue fell 28% to the equivalent of $6.2 billion.

Xiaomi cited shrinking consumer demand in China, which had pandemic-related lockdowns in the quarter, as well as rising food and fuel prices around the globe.

In the same quarter, worldwide smartphone shipments declined nearly 9% compared with a year earlier to 286 million units, according to research firm International Data Corp. The biggest drag on the market was China, but the U.S. and most other regions were also weaker, IDC said.

Sean Mullee, a 23-year-old economist in Washington, D.C., recently moved to the capital from Ohio and said he found the cost of living high, especially now with inflation running at more than 8%. Mr. Mullee, who has an iPhone X he got a couple of years ago, said he wasn’t planning to upgrade for now.

“When your car breaks down, it’s like, ‘OK, well I need a car, so I have to go get one.’ But until then, I’m going to keep putting it off,” he said.

The situation has changed from the first two years of the pandemic, when people staying at home were using their phones more. In that period, demand was strong and the biggest problem for the industry was the supply chain, which was hit by shipping delays, Covid-19 lockdowns and a shortage of semiconductors. Those issues haven’t gone away but are gradually easing.

“What started out as a supply-constrained industry earlier this year has turned into a demand-constrained market,” said Nabila Popal, an analyst with IDC.

The slowdown isn’t uniform. Sales of smartphones priced above $900 grew more than 20% in the first half of this year compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. The segment includes Samsung’s foldable smartphones and many of Apple’s latest iPhones.

Only about one in 10 smartphones globally fell into that premium category in the first half of the year, but it accounted for 70% of industry profits, Counterpoint said. Canalys Research analyst Runar Bjørhovde said wealthy consumers aren’t as bothered by the higher cost of daily expenses and still want to have the latest phones in their pockets.

On the flip side, some big carriers are seeing more subscribers default on their payments as inflation takes a bite out of household finances. “Naturally they’re not going to see people buying new phones if they can’t even pay for their phone subscriptions,” said Mr. Bjørhovde.

Samsung introduced budget 5G models in March, a move it said was aimed at stimulating demand, while it is also pitching foldable phones that cost as much as $1,800 in the premium market.

Apple, which is expected to roll out the latest versions of its iPhone in September, benefits from being primarily a high-end brand, but there are signs that it can’t rest easy.

The biggest iPhone assembler, Foxconn Technology Group, said this month that it saw slowing demand for smartphones, as did Qualcomm Inc., a chip supplier to Apple and others, in July.

Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a leader in advanced smartphone chips, said recently that its smartphone business is no longer its biggest revenue generator. The No. 1 spot is now held by high-performance computing chips that are used in applications such as graphics processing and autonomous driving.

China, which accounts for nearly a quarter of global smartphone shipments, is at the centre of concerns about global demand.

From July 29 to Aug. 1, Apple took the unusual step of discounting its iPhones in China and running ads online advertising the sale. It knocked the equivalent of nearly $100 off the price of its iPhone 13 Pro Max and 13 Pro models.

Wang Xiang, the president of Xiaomi, alluded to a similar situation on Friday when reporting the company’s weak results, including a 67% drop in net profit. “Due to the weak market demand, we are trying various ways to clear our inventory, which has caused a decline in profit,” he said.

Zhao Haijun, co-chief executive officer of Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., said he saw some companies involved in making smartphones or smartphone parts suddenly cutting orders.

“That triggered a panic in the supply chain,” Mr. Zhao said on an investor call this month.

Feng Xiao, a 37-year-old sports-event organiser based in Shanghai, echoed Mr. Mullee in the U.S. when asked whether she was planning to upgrade her phone. “My iPhone 12, which I’ve used for about two years, is still just fine,” she said.

Analysts said they thought demand would likely start to improve later this year or next year and the people who say they are happy with their phones would eventually get restless. That assumes there won’t be major global disruptions such as a deepening of the U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan or a new surge in inflation.

“We continue to believe that any reduction today is not demand that is lost, but simply pushed forward,” said IDC’s Ms. Popal.

—Jiyoung Sohn contributed to this article.

It has been two years since forecasters felt this good about the economic outlook.

In the latest quarterly survey by The Wall Street Journal, business and academic economists lowered the chances of a recession within the next year to 29% from 39% in the January survey . That was the lowest probability since April 2022, when the chances of a recession were set at 28%.

Economists, in fact, don’t think the economy will get even close to a recession. In January, they on average forecast sub-1% growth in each of the first three quarters of this year. Now, they expect growth to bottom out this year at an inflation-adjusted 1.4% in the third quarter.

Just 10% of survey respondents think the economy will experience at least one quarter of negative growth over the next 12 months, down from 33% in January.

The Wall Street Journal survey was conducted from April 5 to 9, just before the release of March consumer-price index data showing inflation running hotter than economists had anticipated.

The U.S. economy has far outperformed expectations over the past year and a half. Instead of stumbling under the weight of the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive interest-rate-raising campaign in four decades, it has continued expanding at a robust clip.

Few think that the economy can do quite as well as last year’s 3.1% growth, as measured by the seasonally adjusted fourth-quarter change from a year earlier. That figure might have been boosted by one-time factors such as federal infrastructure and semiconductor legislation and an uptick in immigration , which also might not last.

Still, economists have had to rethink forecasts for a major slowdown as more time has passed and one still doesn’t seem imminent. Economists on average think the economy grew at a 2.2% rate in the first three months of the year, up from a 0.9% forecast in January.

“The U.S. economy is performing very well,” EconForecaster economist James Smith said in the survey. “We’re truly the envy of the world.”

Much has changed since economists were last this optimistic. Two years ago, the Fed’s benchmark federal-funds rate was set between 0.25% and 0.5%. Inflation was high but economists still generally thought that it could come down without too much help from the Fed. They forecast steady growth and the midpoint of the range for the fed-funds rate topping out at just above 2.5%.

Now, the fed-funds rate is sitting between 5.25% and 5.5%, and economists don’t see a bunch of cuts coming soon. Many analysts trimmed their rate-cut forecasts after last week’s hot inflation report. But even before the report, survey respondents predicted that rates would end the year at 4.67%, implying three cuts. In January, their responses suggested that they thought four or five cuts were likely.

Economists now think the economy can withstand higher rates than they did not long ago.

They expect the 10-year Treasury yield—a key borrowing benchmark that was around 4.4% at the time of the survey—to end 2024 at 3.97%. Looking further into the future, they expect the yield to end 2026 at 3.78%. That is slightly above even their forecast last October, when the yield was higher than it is now.

Many economists have long thought that the economy can handle higher interest rates when it is capable of growing faster, and particularly when worker productivity has increased.

To that end, economists expect the Labor Department’s measure of productivity to rise at an annual rate of 1.9% over the next decade. That matches the annual increase in productivity over the last 40 years. But it is above the 1.2% pace of the 2010s, when the 10-year Treasury yield was typically stuck between 1.5% and 2.5%.

Some economists are now enthusiastic about the economy’s longer-term potential.

“We think that the American economy has entered a virtuous cycle where strong productivity results in growth above the long-term trend, inflation between 2% and 2.5% and an unemployment rate between 3.5% and 4%,” RSM US chief economist Joe Brusuelas said in the survey.

Many aren’t quite as optimistic. One downside of a better growth outlook is that a stronger economy could make it harder for inflation to fall all the way back to the Fed’s 2% target.

An inflation gauge that is closely watched by the Fed, the core personal-consumption expenditures price index, was 2.8% in February, its most recent reading. Economists now expect it to end the year at 2.5%, after having forecast 2.3% in January.

Economists, on average, believe that core PCE inflation will fall to 2.1% by the end of next year without a recession. However, their projections might already have ticked higher after last week’s price data, and some continue to worry that the Fed’s efforts to control inflation still present a major threat to the economy.

“The risks are clearly skewed toward more hawkish Fed outcomes, which could drag on our growth forecasts,” Deutsche Bank economists Brett Ryan and Matthew Luzzetti said in the survey.

The Wall Street Journal survey was answered by 69 economists. Not every economist responded to every question.

Time to Upgrade Your Old Phone? More Consumers Say, ‘Not Yet’

Economists lift their growth forecasts in latest Wall Street Journal survey