Cellphone sales are set to fall up to 4 percent in 2009 from this year as the economic slowdown hurts consumer demand across the world, research company Gartner Inc. said.

Handset makers had remained relatively unscathed by the global economic crisis this year, but successive warnings from Nokia, Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp. signalled a rapid deterioration of consumer electronics demand.

Gartner said sales of mobile handsets in the largest region of Asia Pacific, which includes the two biggest growth markets, China and India, rose 13.8 percent in the third quarter to 116.7 million phones, but warned growth would come to a halt.

"We expect the global economic decline and associated drop in disposable incomes to make sales in the region almost flat during the fourth quarter of 2008," analyst Anshul Gupta said in a statement.

Gartner said the slowdown in developed markets in the region, coupled with delayed replacement purchases in emerging markets, will hurt growth there.

By: DocMemory
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