It’s no big secret that the smartphone market has gone through an extended rough patch in the last few years, but as repeatedly predicted in 2019 by multiple research firms, global shipments should get a healthy boost in 2020 largely thanks to the advent of 5G.

Keeping the focus on the immediate future, it’s definitely worth highlighting that Gartner doesn’t expect global mobile phone shipments to grow by a large margin this year compared to 2019. The latest forecast calls for a modest 1.7 percent hike to 1.77 billion units, followed by a tiny decline predicted for 2021 and a bigger one in 2022, when sales could drop as low as 1.75 billion units.

Otherwise put, the overall market boost generated by the spread of 5G-capable handsets will be short-lived, but at least the sales total is not forecasted to fall as abruptly as it did in the last couple of years. When looking at phones and computers together, the situation is unsurprisingly a bit bleaker, as the PC market is expected to continue shrinking through 2022 after an unexpected progress of 0.6 percent reported for 2019 compared to 2018.