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.

David Beckham was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday with Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan to promote their new partnership. But all anyone wanted to talk about was his son.

After the obligatory questions about business and the World Cup, a host on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” lobbed Beckham an out-of-left-field query about how young people can preserve their mental health in the age of social media.

“Children are allowed to make mistakes,” Beckham, 50, said. “That’s how they learn. So, that’s what I try to teach my kids, but you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”

Just a day earlier, his 26-year-old son Brooklyn Beckham had posted a series of accusations about his soccer-famous father and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer mother, Victoria Beckham.

He said that his parents had controlled him for years, lied about him to the press and sought to damage his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham. Their goal, he said, was to affect the image of a “perfect family.”

“My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote on Instagram. “Brand Beckham comes first.”

That brand has been burnished over decades of professional triumphs, tabloid scandals and slick dealmaking.

Recently, both David and Victoria Beckham put their legacies on-screen in docuseries that cast them as hardworking entrepreneurs and devoted parents. Their image appeared stronger than ever. Now their firstborn child is throwing stones.

Representatives for David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Nicola Peltz Beckham declined to comment.

In the U.K., the Beckhams are as close as you can get to royalty without sharing Windsor DNA. David is perhaps the most famous English player in soccer history, while Victoria parlayed her Spice Girls fame into a career as a respected fashion designer.

Their partnership was forged in the cauldron of 1990s celebrity gossip, with their every move—in their careers, their bumpy personal lives and their adventurous senses of personal style—subject to tabloid scrutiny.

“They were Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” said Elaine Lui, founder of the website Lainey Gossip.

Over time, the couple became savvy managers of their own brand, a sprawling modern empire including a professional soccer team, fashion and beauty lines, investment deals and commercial partnerships.

In recent years they each released a Netflix docuseries—“Beckham” in 2023, “Victoria Beckham” in 2025—featuring scenes from their private family life. (Brooklyn and Nicola appeared in David’s series, but not Victoria’s.)

“The way they’ve performed their celebrity has been togetherness,” Lui said: Appearing and engaging with the world as a happily married couple, in both relative calm and amid scandal. And as their family grew, their four children became smiling ambassadors for Brand Beckham, too.

Until Monday night. In a series of Instagram Story posts, Brooklyn accused his parents of “trying endlessly to ruin” his marriage to Nicola, an actress and model, and the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz . Brooklyn declared, “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”

Where Victoria and David seemed to see press scrutiny as part of the job, Brooklyn and Nicola are operating in a manner more typical of their own generation. Brooklyn’s posts call to mind the “no contact” boundaries some children have enforced with their parents in recent years to much pop-psych chatter.

Andrew Friedman, managing director of crisis communications at Orchestra, said he’d advised many clients through family drama. “Going public,” he said, should be a “last resort.”

He’s also warned clients that using social media to air grievances opens a can of worms. “Nuance is not welcome in social-media feeding frenzies,” Friedman said. “Sensational and unusual details will overshadow the central issue.”

Brooklyn, the eldest of the Beckhams’ four children, has built a following in his parents’ image, though without the benefit (or burden) of a steady career.

He’s worked as a model, photographer, cooking-show host and most recently founded a hot-sauce brand. Brooklyn and Nicola went public with their relationship in 2020 and married in a lavish 2022 ceremony at her family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

Rumors of a family feud flared almost immediately after the wedding, including whispers about the fact that Nicola didn’t wear a dress made by her fashion-designer mother-in-law.

Brooklyn on Monday recounted further grievances related to a mother-son dance and the seating chart. In the months and years that followed, celebrity journalists and fans closely tracked both generations of the family, looking for cracks in the relationship.

But official dispatches from Beckham World suggested that things were just fine. In a scene from the final episode of David’s Netflix series, the Beckham family, including Brooklyn and Nicola, joke around on a visit to their country home. It’s a picture of familial bliss.

“We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing as possible. But you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mom that was Posh Spice,” David says in voice-over.

“And they could be little s—s. And they’re not. And that’s why I say I’m so proud of my children, and I’m so in awe of my children, the way they’ve turned out.”

TIME TO UPGRADE YOUR OLD PHONE? MORE CONSUMERS SAY, ‘NOT YET’

In a series of social-media posts, the eldest child of David and Victoria Beckham threw stones at the image of a ‘perfect family’.