Consumer finance provider Home Credit Philippines revealed that mobile phones are the most in-demand product for their consumers.
Puneet Suneja, Home Credit Chief Sales Officer, said they had financed over 10.5 million mobile phones in the country since 2013. This covers over half of their sales.
“Our most popular products typically are mobile phones…That’s the product that has the quickest upgrade lifecycle. People are changing their phones every year or [every] two years,” Suneja said in a briefing on Thursday.
The finance provider company is celebrating its 10th year of operations in the country.
Meanwhile, despite the huge mobile phone sales of Home Credit, International Data Corporation (IDC) data recorded that the smartphone market in the country had its biggest decline of 8.6% in 2022.
IDC Senior Market Analyst Angela Medez associated this downtrend with inflation.
“Both consumer and vendor confidence has been seriously dampened as inflation progressively soared throughout 2022 ending the year at a 14-year high,” Medez said.
READ: Philippines February inflation eases to 8.6% y/y
Demand for laptop, bicycle rise
Aside from mobile phones, Suneja also noticed a spike in demand for laptops during the COVID-19 pandemic as work and education shifted online.
“[Laptop] was a big demand during the pandemic. Since 2020 when the pandemic hit, there was sudden demand where people needed to suddenly transform the way they actually went to schools or the way they worked. There was a huge demand for laptops,” Suneja said.
When the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in 2020, Suneja said the demand for bicycles also increased as most of the public transportation systems were paralyzed or operated in limited capacities.
He also shared that electronically-powered bicycles are also becoming more popular among Filipino consumers.
The National Economic and Development Authority said bicycle imports skyrocketed to 112% to 2.1 million units in 2020, according to the data from the Bureau of Customs.
