February 15, 2007
3GSM in numbers
At trade shows like 3GSM there are always a huge number of statistics and forecasts flying around as executives try to convince their customers and investors of the huge market opportunities ahead. Here are some of the ones that kept coming up at this year’s Congress, grouped under some loose themes. This might be a fun list to keep and check in a couple of years to see if any of it came true.
Internet connections - mobile and fixed - are set to grow rapidly:
• 2.5bn people are connected to the internet today
• 5bn are expected to be connected in 2015
• 500m people are expected to be using mobile broadband in 2010
• Internet traffic grew 20-fold between 2000 and 2006
It is expected to increase 100-fold by 2015 Mobile phone connections are going to increase rapidly:
• There are now around 1.8bn mobile phone connections in the world
• This is expected to rise to 3bn in 2007 and 4bn in 2010
• 1bn mobile phones were shipped in 2006
• Mobile handset sales are expected to grow 10 per cent this year
Developing countries - such as India - are a much more interesting growth opportunity than Europe:
• 210m mobile phones were sold in Europe in 2006
• European mobile sales grew 5 per cent in 2006
• 15 countries in Europe have mobile penetration of more than 100 per cent.
• India has a mobile penetration of 13 per cent
• This is expected to rise to 40 per cent within the next few years
There is still a lot of growth left in the business market:
• Only 30 per cent of people working in companies have company mobile phones
• Only 5 per cent of the world’s 650m corporate email boxes are accessible by mobile phone.
Converged mobile phones (ones that have an integrated camera, music player, TV or other features) are becoming the norm:
• 1 in 20 phones sold in 2006 had a camera of 3 megapixels or more
• More than half the phones sold had integrated MP3 players
• 250m converged mobile phones will be sold in 2008
• 20m TV-enabled handsets will be sold by the end of 2009
The internet world moves a lot faster than the mobile world:
• It took YouTube 18 months to reach 20m users
• It took the mobile industry a decade to reach that many customers in Western Europe
What is intersting about “GSM in Numbers” is what is not said. It says nothing about the amount of mobile commerce, mobile enterprise applications or mobile mail. Mobile commerce in Japan exceeded $10 Billion US in 2005, articles about mobile enterprise applications appear every week in the Nikkei Journal, and 70% of mobile phone users in Japan had phones with mobile mail by the end of 2001. When you consider these limitations, we can only conclude that the GSM members are not serving their customers well.
Jeffrey Funk
Professor, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo Japan
Reference:
Posted by: Jeffrey Funk | February 18th, 2007 at 3:10 am | Report this commentFunk, J. Solving the startup problem in Western mobile Internet markets, Telecommunications Policy, February 2007, Pages 14-30