Since its formulation in 1979, Porter’s five forces model has long served as a canonical tool within strategic management for analysing industrial structures and appraising industry profit making potential, and is widely adopted in business consulting, academic research and industrial analysis. Nevertheless, pervasive template driven application is observed in practical operations and academic studies. Most extant research merely treats the five forces model as a checklist style completion instrument, neglecting its profound industrial economics theoretical underpinnings. System conducted empirical research that examines the model’s explanatory boundaries with a single representative industry as the analytical carrier remains scarce. Grounded in the industrial economics Structure Conduct Performance (SCP) paradigm, this paper systematically reconstructs the complete theoretical lineage of Porter’s five forces model and clarifies its core causal logic: industrial structure shapes competitive intensity, and competitive intensity determines average industrial returns. Drawing on the global smartphone industry as a consistent case throughout the text, theoretical elaboration and industrial empirical analysis are conducted across five dimensions: intensity of rivalry among existing competitors, threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, and threat of substitutes. It is found that the global smartphone industry presents a competitive landscape characterised by “two high, two moderate and one low”: rivalry among incumbent competitors is extremely intense, buyers possess high bargaining power, suppliers hold moderate to high bargaining power, the threat of substitutes ranges from low to moderate, and the threat posed by new entrants stands at moderate to low. The industry generally sits within the mature phase of its lifecycle, featuring fierce competitive pressures and low average sector wide profitability, and constitutes a consumer electronics sector with an overall unfavourable industrial structure. Conceived within an industrial economy context, the conventional five forces model exhibits salient analytical limitations when confronted with contemporary industrial realities defined by the rise of digital platforms and ecosystem centred competition. It fails to characterise the intricate competitive dynamics embedded within digital ecosystems, offers insufficient explanations for the mechanisms underpinning platform mediated two sided network effects, and lacks analytical dimensions for complements and strategic ecosystem partners. To address these deficiencies, the Multi Forces Framework (MFF) is introduced as a theoretical extension instrument. Supplementary analysis of digital ecosystem dynamics within the smartphone industry is delivered from three perspectives: operating system platforms, application ecosystems, and digital service revenue models. The innovations of this study lie in the completion of theoretical tracing, force oriented empirical assessment and theoretical extension for digital economy scenarios within a unified analytical logic. An integrated, empirically actionable research framework for industrial competition analysis under digitalisation is thereby provided, alongside pragmatic reference points for consumer electronics firms’ strategic positioning and industrial decision making.