This is the world's most profitable market for smartphones, and the most closed

Shubham Mazumdar is a well known doctor in Los Altos, Silicon Valley. When he's not working, his biggest hobby is digital devices, especially playing with different smartphones, which is how we met. As a veteran "geek", he has, by his own account, acquired seven or eight smartphones almost every year for over a decade.

But unlike other American digital enthusiasts, Mazumdar has a particular preference for Chinese smartphones. He is an Android loyalist, but not a big fan of Samsung, and with so few options in the US market, Chinese smartphones have opened up a whole other world to him. Over the years, he has bought Chinese smartphones from OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor and many other brands.

"Not only is the price/performance ratio very good, but there are also a lot of user-friendly details, such as double-opening apps and photo scanning functions. On the US side of Android phones there are too few options, the Google Pixel 6a ($450 before tax, or over $3,000) still has a 60hz refresh rate screen and other parameters like the camera and screen on the Moto phone are mediocre." This is how he explains his preference for Chinese smartphones.

Mazumdar is always shopping online or asking friends and family in the US to bring him new Chinese flagship smartphones, as some of the Chinese phones are only available in China and do not have international ROMs, and he has lost access to them in the past two years. (His wife is Chinese.)

Mazumdar has gone to all this trouble to buy Chinese smartphones because, of course, they are not available in the US and he can't get them from official sources (except for the US-listed One Plus). As he notes, due to the collective lack of Chinese smartphones, US consumers have only a handful of mid- to high-end options other than Apple and Samsung, leaving the Android-minded "geek" looking for Chinese smartphones online.

$75 billion in annual revenue

Statistics from Statista show that the US smartphone market peaked in 2018 with a total of $79.1 billion and 163 million units shipped that year. Although there was a slight decline in the following years, there was a significant rebound in 2021 following the outbreak of the epidemic.

Last year, the US smartphone market generated total revenue of $74.7 billion, up 2.3% year-on-year, and shipped a total of 147 million units, up 6% year-on-year. It is worth noting that the average price of sales in the US smartphone market exceeded $500 last year, indicating a mature market dominated by mid- to high-end phones.