Despite a slow global economy, sales of smartphones surge to 1.65 billion units in 2025

By creammagazine, September 17, 2025

Few devices in the new tech arena have experienced such a surge in sales over the years as smartphones. While Covid-19 and inflation both caused major cuts in consumer spending, people never stopped pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into new devices, with an increase in units shipped increasing each year.

The fear of missing out on the latest smartphone trends, combined with a flood of affordable, high-tech models, has pushed five-year smartphone shipments to record levels.

According to data presented by Jemlit.com, in the past five years alone, consumers worldwide have bought a staggering 9.3 billion smartphones, with another 8.5 billion expected to hit the market by 2030.

Annual Shipments to Grow by an Average of 20 Million by 2030

Today`s smartphones are far from the devices we used just ten years ago. They now serve as all-in-one gadgets for apps, finance, entertainment, and business, miles ahead of their functionality in the 2000s or 2010s.

Consumers want devices packed with tech advances like high-end cameras, foldable screens, and smart assistants, and they`re willing to dig deep into their pockets to have it all.

At the same time, emerging markets, where consumers spend far less on smartphones, have become flooded with affordable devices, further driving sales. Shorter upgrade cycles, now a standard trend in the tech space, are just a cherry on top. This perfect storm of events has turned smartphones into one of the best-selling tech devices, and Statista data backs this up.

For more than a decade, people have been buying well over 1.5 billion new smartphones each year, a mind-blowing figure for a market already flooded with existing devices. In 2024 alone, 1.63 billion new smartphones hit the market, 10 million more than the year before and roughly 50 million more than in 2023. The upward trend will continue in 2025, with annual sales reaching 1.65 billion, and pushing five-year shipments to 9.3 billion globally.

But it’s not just the number of devices that is skyrocketing. Between 2020 and 2024, global smartphone buyers spent between $420 billion and $470 billion annually, matching the GDP of a mid-sized economy. After surpassing half a trillion dollars for the first time in 2026, consumers will keep adding between $18 billion and $20 billion to the global smartphone bill each year, driving industry revenue to over $560 billion by 2029.

People to Buy 6x more Smartphones by 2030, than Laptops, Tablets, and Desktop PCs Combined

While 8.5 billion units is a mind-blowing figure on its own, the sheer volume of smartphones expected to flood the market in the following years becomes even more striking when compared to other top-selling devices in the tech space. For instance, according to Statista, consumers worldwide are expected to buy 951 million tablets by 2030, nearly nine times less than smartphones. With laptops and desktop PCs, the gap is even bigger.

Statistics show 441 million new laptops on the market in the next five years, or 19 times less than smartphones, while desktop PCs trail far behind, with a more modest (lol) 65 million units- or 130 times less than smartphones.

Even more shockingly, this means people will buy six times more smartphones by 2030 than laptops, tablets, and desktop PCs combined.

Talk about communication on the go…

Michael Mastess