Categories: Mobile

Mobile web use will overtake desktop by 2015, India has 15% of world’s mobile users

The recent global mobile trends show the bullish growth of mobile across the world. Mobile usage has been growing rampantly in every country. But what is the usage trend across the world of mobile users?

Mobile usage across the world

Few important points from the report are,

As of 2011, 87% of world’s population (5.9 billion of 7 billion) are mobile phone users. Not sure how to translate this – does it mean 5.9 billion have mobile handsets? Or do 5.9 billion have ‘access’ to a mobile phone (includes sharing with others)
488.5 million smartphones were sold in 2011 (up by 63% from 2010) compared to 415 million PCs (source: Canalys in Mint, March 26, 2012)
In India, about 19.1 million smartphones are expected to be sold in 2012 which is a 78% growth over 2011 (source: Mint, March 26, 2012)
30% of world’s mobile users are in China (963 million) and India (844 million)
300,000 mobile apps have been developed in the last 3 years (2008-2011). These apps have been downloaded 10.9 billion times.
The mobile phone is used almost uniformly across home, office, on road.
Social networking (i.e. Facebook!) & search are used the highest on a mobile

Mobile Web Users

17% of the global population use the mobile web (1.2 billion users)
Mobile web subscriptions outnumber fixed-line broadband users (2:1)
8.5% of traffic for websites in Jan 2012 was from a mobile device (double from Jan 2011)
Mobile web users will cross-desktop users by 2015. We can expect this in India may be even before 2015.
79% of leading ecommerce sites haven’t optimized their site for the mobile (duh!)

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BG Mahesh

Internet application ideator and implementor. Been there and done that since early 1990s. I like to present data to the common man in the simplest manner on the internet.