Mobile Data Points

Many thanks to mobile guru Tomi Ahonen, who was kind enough to forward me some extracts from his Almanac 2010. The Almanac collects together data about the mobile industry world­wide. If you aren’t already switched on to Tomi, I’d very much recom­mend anyone inter­ested in this field to check out his pub­lic­a­tions and also the Communities Dominate Brands blog that he co-​​authors with Alan Moore.

I got the ten-​​minute version of his work. For your con­veni­ence, here’s a two minute version, covering some of the figures that might be sur­prising or inter­esting to readers of this blog.

Q: How big is mobile?

A: Very big.

The pop­u­la­tion of the world is 6.8bn. There are 4.6bn mobile phone sub­scrip­tions. That’s 700,000 more than there are FM radios; three times as many as there are TV sets; four times as many as there are land line phones or PCs; five times the number of cars in the world.

In the Industrialised World, the pen­et­ra­tion rate is 133%. In other words, a third of us have two mobile subscriptions.

In the Emerging World, rep­res­enting 4/​5 of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, the pen­et­ra­tion rate is 56%. Not so high, but mobiles non­ethe­less account for more than double the number of radios; five times the number of tele­vi­sions; six times the number of PCs. Ahonen states that mobile is the first media in the emerging world; it’s the “only medium able to reach half of the population”.

Q: What makes the most money?

A: Contracts and access, of course, and then voice calls.

Voice revenues – worth $615bn in 2009 and growing.

Messaging (SMS & MMS) is worth $153bn, and also growing. MMS – which I still consider quite niche and unused – was worth $29bn in 2009.

Q: And the mobile internet?

A: It’s growing fast, but even the largest parts of this area don’t do half of the business that ‘lowly’ MMS does.

Mobile data services are worth $98bn in total. The largest segments of this are video ($14bn), music and ring­tones ($13.9bn) and video games ($11.6bn). These revenues are growing at 15–25% year-​​on-​​year.

The fastest-​​growing segments of the data market are mobile learning and search, each of which has grown over 200% in the last year. Mobile advert­ising and mar­keting is finally starting to happen, too, grossing $5.9bn last year, up 85% on 2008.

Mobile social net­working is the fourth biggest earner overall in data, worth $10.3bn in 2009.

Q: Should I make an iPhone app for my publication/​brand?

A: If you are looking for reach, no: you should make a Nokia app. Even better, Java or (best) an SMS or WAP-​​based service.

Overall, Nokia has 38% of mobile device market share. Samsung has 20% and LG 10%. The fourth and fifth place are taken by SonyEricsson and Motorola.

If you restrict the sample to smart­phones, Nokia is again way out front with 39% market share. Then it’s RIM (Blackberry) with 21%. Apple has 15% and HTC (Android) just 5%.

Smartphones rep­resent only 13% of the mobile device market. On the other hand, 95% of phones can do WAP and every phone can now do SMS. Over 90% of phones are capable of 2.5G or faster trans­mis­sion speeds now, so this isn’t the WAP you remember from the nineties. 53% of the phones in use world-​​wide can do Java apps.

Picture credit: RoamMobility

PS: Tomi has given me per­mis­sion to pass on the full data he sent me via email, so leave a comment if you’d like this.

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