Global smartphone shipments

Indian IT services exports going up while global smartphone shipments go down. The negative correlation is genuinely strange: the country whose engineers build apps for those phones is busier, even as the phones themselves are sold in fewer units. The end-user wallet got tighter; the back-office bill did not.

India's IT services exports doubled from about 100 to over 200 billion dollars between 2015 and 2024 as global enterprise IT outsourcing accelerated. Global smartphone shipments peaked at about 1.5 billion in 2017 and have declined to roughly 1.2 billion as upgrade cycles lengthened, market saturation hit emerging markets, and the cost-of-living squeeze pushed users to keep their phones longer. Two unrelated stories of the same decade: software services kept expanding even as the hardware running them slowed down. The work has more demand than the device.

Software grew, hardware plateaued. The phone in your hand is older, but the engineers behind it are newer.