Global Mobile Statistics – The real drivers behind mobile industry growth

14 May 2011 Leave a Comment

by telecominfo in Mobile Statistics, telecom market research

The invention of Mobile technology has proved to be a boom to the telecom industry over the years. It all started with just simple voice communication to talk to their near and dear ones.

Today, Mobile Internet has completely changed the way people use their mobile phones. This on the move device along with mobile internet engages people from anything as simple as listening to music, content download, playing games, watching videos, getting live score updates, reading breaking news to as complex & secure transactions such as mobile payments – shopping and banking.

Here are some global statistics for all of us to know, which is acting as the backbone for mobile industry related growth (Source: mobithinking):

1. Over 5.3 billion mobile users worldwide (March 2011 report) – leaders China (879 million) followed by India (790 million).
2. Google’s Android market share was 32.9% in Q4 of 2010, passing the iPhone at 30.6%.
3. Top 5 mobile manufacturer sales in  2011 – Nokia, Samsung, iPhone, LG and RIM.
4. 8.2 billion mobile app downloads in 2010.
5. SMS is still king of mobile messaging with more than 6.1 trillion messages sent in 2010.
6. There are more than 200 million active users (40%) currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
7. Mobile Advertising market is $2.7 billion.
8. Most popular activities on the mobile web are mobile search, reading news and sports information, downloading music and videos, and email and instant messages.
9. The most used mobile apps in the US are games, news, maps, social networking and music.
10. Japanese are still much more advanced in mobile behavior, with 53.3% using apps, compared to 34.4 % in the US and 28.0% in Europe.

Future Predictions

Market research experts (IDC, ABI Research, Gartner, Coda Research) are predicting, there will be more to come. Here is what experts have to say:

1. Mobile advertising will rise to $6.6 billion by 2016, average growth of 19.4% each year.
2. Global app downloads will reach 76.9 billion in 2014 and will be worth US $35 billion.
3. Demand for app will peak in 2013 and app stores will slowly decline as subscribers migrate from download apps to mobile Web sites and more popular download apps, such as social networking, are preloaded on mobile devices.
4. By the end of 2011, revenue worldwide from mobile app store downloads could exceed $15 billion, amounting to a 190 percent spike from the $5.2 billion generated last year.
5. Premium content and paid apps will have limited demand.
6. Demand for Video content is on a rise. There will be 74millions mobile internet video users in US alone by 2015, up from 21 million in 2010.
7. The top 10 ways consumers will use mobile in 2012 – Money transfer, location-based services, mobile search, mobile browsing, mobile health monitoring, mobile payment, Near-field-communication services, mobile advertising, mobile instant messaging and mobile music.

What do you think? Will these numbers come true?  Let’s watch out how these numbers contribute to mobile industry growth in the coming years.

- Kavyanidhi Narayan

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