Astounding Mobile Facts

Astounding Mobile Facts.

Successful Marketing in the very near future will include mobile devices.

“In the last twelve months, customers around the world have ordered more than US $1 billion of products from Amazon using a mobile device," – Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com (July 2010).

“There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.” – Facebook official statistics (August, 2010).

Those statistics -

1) Mobile subscribers will surpass 5 billion in 2010 (that's over 70 percent of the world population) and growing rapidly, led by China and India.* What other medium offers that reach?

2) Half a billion people accessed mobile Internet worldwide in 2009. Usage will double within five years as mobile overtakes the PC as the most popular way to get on the Web.

* But with 233 million mobile Web users in China alone, is this estimate conservative?

3) By 2011, over 85 percent of new handsets will be able to access the mobile Web.

* Please note that this does not mean smartphones – you do not need a smartphone to access the mobile Web (but it does make for a richer experience).

4) The number of 3G handsets is growing fast. 3G means faster access the mobile Web (assuming a 3G network is available).

* While very high 3G handset penetration helps to keep Japan at the pinnacle of mobile Web, very low 3G penetration in China hasn't stopped rapid growth.

5) Mobile devices sales fell slightly in 2009, while smartphone sales showed strong growth albeit from a small base.

6) SMS is still king of mobile messaging with five trillion messages sent in 2009. Despite the popularity of mobile email, IM and MMS, SMS is predicted to exceed 10 trillion in 2013.

7) Estimates for expenditure on mobile advertising and marketing worldwide ranged from US$1.4 billion to $7.5 billion in 2009, all analysts forecast rapid growth. But with annual mobile advertising expenditure of US$1.14 billion in Japan alone, are these estimates on the low side or is Japan still light years ahead of the rest of the world?

8) What do consumers use their mobiles for? According to this US data: 1. calls; 2. SMS; 3. mobile Web; 4. apps; 5. games; 6. social networking; 7. music.

How will consumers use their mobiles in the future? The key drivers for mobile usage are expected to be (in order of importance) money transfer; (Local) location-based services; mobile search; mobile browsing; mobile health monitoring; mobile payment; near-field-communication services; mobile advertising; instant messaging; and mobile music.

9) The top five mobile network operators worldwide that derive more of their revenue from data than other operators are all Asian: Smart Philippines, Globe Philippines, SoftBank Japan, NTT DOCOMO Japan, KDDI Japan. Also four of the top five MNOs for (loyalty) are also Asian. Also includes top five for subscribers, revenues, monthly average revenue per user (ARPU).

Japan, Asia and Europe are light years ahead of the United States in the mobile marketplace.

Information collated from mobithinking.com