THE STATE OF THE WIRELESS INDUSTRY: A TRILLION DOLLAR OPPORTUNITY

In the beginning of 2012, more than 77 countries have passed 100% mobile phone penetrations per capita. Meanwhile the leading countries continue to push past 150% and past 175% and even yes, past 200% mobile phone penetration rate - as the UAE did becoming the first country with literally two mobile phone accounts for every living person of any age.

The planet has a population of 7 Billion people alive. And now there are 5.9 Billion active mobile phone subscriptions. That is a global penetration rate of 84.3%. To put it another way, if we allocated all mobile phones to every living person by age, starting with the over 100 year olds, and then proceeded down every person alive getting one mobile phone subscription, today the ages we would cover comes down to everybody older than the age of .. eight! Yes, if the 5.9 Billion mobile phone subscriptions were distributed evenly, every single person on the planet age 9 or older, would have one.

In one decade the wireless industry grew more than 8 fold. This mobile industry has sustained a compound annual growth rate of 24% year-on-year for a whole decade! (when measured in its paying customers, obviously, the revenue growth is not quite that dramatic while also good). Even the past year, we grew new customers from 5.2 Billion to 5.9 Billion, adding 700 million new customers in the past year. The whole mobile industry had only 700 million customers a decade ago! The growth rate of adding 700 million new customers to 5.2 Billion is still an enormous 13.5% in just one year.

Compared to the landline, ten years ago fixed landline had over a 50% larger base. Today, if a telephone rings anywhere on the planet the odds are 5 to 1, that the phone ringing is a mobile phone. Today the picture is so lopsided, that for 5.9 Billion mobile accounts, there are only 1.1 Billion fixed landline telephones worldwide.

GLOBAL MOBILE SUBSCRIBERS AND HANDSETS IN USE

MOBILE DATA - Update 2012

You may have heard some say that soon there will be more users of the internet on moble phones than on the PC. Those 'experts' are severely misguided. We passed that milestone two years ago as reported widely from IBM to Nokia. Now we have the latest count of browser based service use on mobile handsets for 2011. Today the number of mobile internet users (including WAP) is 30% of all mobile subscribers - and thus 1.8 Billion total people worldwide - browse internet content on their mobile devices at least part of the time (in the Industrialized World most of us will also have access to a traditional PC). Still out of all 2.2 Billion internet users worldwide today, less than 400 million use a PC exclusively. Over 1 Billion use both a mobile device and a PC to access the internet - and in 2011, 800 million use a mobile handset exclusively as the internet access device. In six of the world's ten largest internet user countries the mobile use is bigger than traditional PC based use (China, Japan, UK, India, Russia and South Korea).

An astonishing milestone also has now passed. The global user base of news and alert services on mobile is 1.9 Billion. Why is that a relevant number? Yes, its four times more than the total circulation of all daily newspapers worldwide - so even accounting for three readers per newspaper, mobile news still now has more (paying) users than total readership (paid and free-loading) of all newspapers printed. But that is not the astonishing number. Now mobile news has passed the total number of television sets in use globally! No wonder the Associated Press Managing Editors declared in September of 2011, that mobile was the future of news.

Wireless network operators total revenues last year passed $1.02 Trillion dollars. $651 Billion of that was in voice call revenues and $186 Billion was in various mobile messaging service revenues. $179 Billion dollars was in premium data services. Beyond the operator/carrier revenues, there was also equipment sales consisting of handsets, networks and various accessories.

MOBILE INDUSTRY REVENUES 2011

TOTAL INDUSTRY  . . . $1,300 B

Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2012

THE SMARTPHONE AGE: Smartphone Shipments exceed PCs

2010 marked the milestone of the start of a new computing and communications era. For the first time in the US, smartphone shipments exceeded the traditional computer segments (desktops, notebooks and netbooks). In 2011, the smartphone segment, along with connected devices will not only exceed the computer segment in unit shipments but more importantly, in overall revenues as well.   According to a Berg Insight report dated March 2011, global shipments of smartphones increased 74 percent in 2010 to 295 million units. Growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.4 percent, shipments are forecasted to reach 1,200 million units in 2015. The global user base of smartphones increased at the same time by 38 percent year-on-year to an estimated 7470 million active users in 2010. In the next five years, the global user base of smartphones is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.9 percent to reach 2.8 billion in 2015. Most importantly, an increasing number of users are now discovering how smartphones can act as a substitute for a PC, camera, music player, phone, game console, chat machine, calculator, or brain booster and are updating their wireless phones every 12 to 18 months as new more technologically advanced models are launched.

"Smartphones and tablets are fueling unprecedented demand for wireless data network capacity. Magnolia’s technology helps network operators meet this growing demand."

"Smartphone devices present a great market opportunity for Magnolia's technology which can be embedded as a software solution that is relevant today as well as in the long term"

A Wireless operators are facing the near future with trepidation as rapidly growing data volumes are putting unprecedented stress on networks around the world in terms of bandwidth, coverage, capacity, and device performance. Specifically, high density areas (most cities) represent the biggest area of concern for wireless network operators. In these areas, networks run the risk of heavy data users congesting network and crowding out light data and voice users. Much of this demand for mobile data may be attributed to smartphones which have usage rates many times those of simple handsets, and new usage patterns (HD video conferencing, audio streaming, VoIP, real-time collaboration, over-the-air downloads and interactivity with apps) are fueling even bigger jumps in bandwidth consumption.