Ng: Another function of smartphones

AFTER years of double-digit growth, even sales of smartphones are cooling.

It seems that during the first quarter of 2018, sales fell over two percent year-on-year, down to 345 million units.

Samsung was number one, selling over 78.2 million units, with a market share of 23 percent, although their sales were also two percent lower than in the same period last year.

Apple was second with 52.2 million units, for a market share of about 15 percent. However, Apple grew its sales by three percent. Number three was Huawei, with 39.3 million units, and number four was Xiaomi, with 28.3 million units. Sales of Xiaomi, however, were almost double than in their previous year, which made it a rapidly growing brand.

Very soon, I think one of the most important applications for smartphones will be its ability to not only chat and receive calls, and shoot pictures or videos, but mostly to act as an electronic wallet. The last two times I was in China, I noticed that among those lining up, I was one of the very few still paying in cash. Most of them just have the register scan their mobile phones to pay. I also could not ride their Grab/Uber equivalent, Didi, because the car received only digital payments.

In China, it is estimated that online sales and digital cash were responsible for over $5.5 trillion in transactions, with over a billion people using either WeChat or Alipay. A few hundred million transactions happen every day.

There are obvious advantages to digital payments – mostly you don’t want to be swamped with coins. Another is it helps me analyze my expenses and keep track of my purchases. The obvious advantage for governments is that since all transactions are digitally recorded, it helps monitor against big-time corruption or laundering of money, although I can see how easy it could become to ask for a few dollars here and there in tips or facilitation fees.

We are not that far behind. Although China and other countries might already be preaching the gospel of digital money, cash is still used in over 85 percent of the transactions.

The United States is also catching up. Overall, 49 percent of US millennials said they have used mobile payments, although only five percent of Americans surveyed last year admitted that they never use cash.

There are numerous articles that suggest digital money will help out the poor countries, and in fact, can become the spark to encourage savings, and new entrepreneurship. Will it?

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