Cell Phone Accessories Market on Sluggish but Steady Recovery

According to a recently published report from marketing research firm ABI Research, the market of cell phone accessories is set to reach approximately $55 billion by the end of 2009. Despite the fact that the figure is slightly down from last year’s figure, the decline is smaller than expected, indicating that the market is improving slowly but steadily following the economy recovery.

The global cell phone accessories market is composed of phone chargers, batteries, Bluetooth headsets, handsfrees, car kits, data cables, carrying cases and other add-on items. Among these categories, the memory card segment is particularly facing challenges.

As pointed out by industry analyst Michael Morgan, the memory card market has been oversupplied and the selling prices are only a little higher than the production cost. Whereas consumers certainly welcome the low prices, this also means memory card vendors have to suffer from low profit margins. However, it seems this condition is starting to change.

"While it’s always dangerous trying to call the bottom of a market, very recently it has begun to look as if memory card prices are stabilizing and even starting to rise slightly," said the analyst.

Another development in the memory card market that benefits consumers is the increase in capacity of cards that ship with newly purchased handsets. While 512MB or 1GB cards are commonly found as in-the-box items, lately more phones are packed with 8GB cards. To increase the cards’ value to consumers, some vendors are even pre-loading various contents on the cards, such as music files, games and software.

Given the multimedia capabilities of today’s handsets, there are also memory cards with higher capacity available, like those microSDHC memory cards with 16GB or 32GB storage.

Looking ahead as a whole, Morgan said the growth of the handset accessory market would remain somewhat sluggish in 2010. However, the market value is expected to overtake the 2008 figure in 2011 and resume its strong upward movement afterwards.

Tags: Bluetooth, Memory Card, Car Charger, Cellular Charger, Cellular Handsfree, Data Cables, Silicon Skin Case