Smartphone and tablet revenues will outstrip consumer electronics in 2013

Smartphone and tablets will outsell the whole consumer electronics market by the end of 2013, according to the latest figures from research firm IHS.

Smartphones and tablet factory revenues will top $354.3 billion (220 billion) in 2013, while consumer electronics will bring in $344.4 (215 billion) billion.

Guest editor's thoughts

As tablets and smartphones continue to offer mobile equivalents of general consumer electronics (video, audio, et cetera) it's no real surprise that the market is due to flip in favour of portable equipment.

There will always be a place for TVs and high quality audio for the home, but the move to portable devices can probably trace its ancestry back to the 1980s and the Sony Walkman cassette player people want to consume their media away from the home. Tablets and smartphones easily address such needs.

Mark Evans, head of IT, RLB

IHS specifies the consumer electronics market as televisions, audio equipment, cameras and camcorders, video game consoles and home appliances, while smartphones include 3G and 4G enabled devices. Both hybrid tablets and media tablets are included in the tablets category.

"The fact that these two product categories are on their own able to generate more OEM factory revenue than the entire CE market illustrates the overwhelming popularity of smartphones and tablets," said Randy Lawson, senior principal analyst for semiconductors at IHS.

"Meanwhile, the CE market has gone flat, with many of the major product types experiencing either low growth or declines in revenue during the past six years."

Smartphones outsold PCs for the first time in 2011 and since then, mobile devices have exploded in popularity.

However, the growth of the smartphone and tablet market is now slowing with a growth rate of 31 per cent in 2013. Between 2007 and 2013, it increased nine-fold.

"Consumers simply are finding more value in the versatility and usefulness of smartphones and tablets, which now serve as the go-to devices for everything from phone calls, to photography, to navigation, to media playback, to fitness tracking," Lawson.

"Because of this, smart mobile platforms are displacing sales of CE products such as digital still cameras, camcorders, GPS and media players."