Global mobile statistics 2012 Home: all the latest stats on mobile Web, apps, marketing, advertising, subscribers, and trends...
December 2012: The essential compendium of need-to-know statistics. Beware of media hype and mobile myth – put your mobile strategy on a sound footing with the latest research from credible independent experts. Global mobile subscribers, handset sales, smartphone market share, mobile Web usage, mobile apps, mobile ad spend, top mobile operators and mobile financial services.
The mobiThinking compendium of mobile statistics and research
The Compendium of global mobile stats received 975,298 pageviews in 2012, check out mobiThinking’s other compelling reads of last year: Most popular content on mobiThinking in 2012.
The stats, all the stats and nothing but the stats…
In the past three years, we have gone from a smattering of mobile statistics to an abundance of useful information. But there's still a long way to go, there are still huge gaps in our knowledge, some countries enjoy a proliferation of data sources, while others have little or none; and the quality of statistics varies incredibly. As telecoms regulators and industry associations start to collect and share meaningful data, things will only get better.
An unfortunate side effect of the media’s recent surge of enthusiasm for mobile in the past year is a tendency to highlight data of dubious quality (often when better is available), and/or widespread misunderstanding, misreporting and failure to qualify figures they have cherry-picked. This isn't just misleading and confusing, it's damaging. If brands are persuaded by hype to divert funds into niche, ill-thought-through mobile projects and then get burnt, the whole mobile business suffers.
This mobile stats compendium – which is regularly updated - hopefully goes some way to putting right some of the sins of the last few years. But please remember that even the best quality independent statistics are speculative to some degree – stats are not facts.
• If you use any of the stats, please remember to source and link to both the analysts and to mobiThinking. Please do not republish more than 5 percent of any piece of content without seeking permission.
• Thanks to all the analysts, associations and regulators that continue to send us their research. Please keep us updated: editor(at)mobiThinking.com.
• Be the first to know when we add new stats: @mobithinking
Finding your way around the mobile stats compendium:
The compendium has now been split up into constituent parts, to help navigation and allow us to add even more stats. Each section opens in a new window.
Section A: Mobile subscribers; handset market share; mobile operators
1) Mobile subscribers worldwide • Mobile subscriptions v unique mobile users (NEW)
2) The top 10 mobile markets (mobile and 3G subscriptions) (NEW): China • India • USA etc.
3) Mobile device shipments • Mobile device penetration
4) Smartphone shipments • Top five smartphone countries (NEW) • smartphone OS market share
5) Smartphone market penetration (NEW)
6) Mobile tablets and e-Readers (NEW)
7) Mobile phone security • Rise of mobile malware
8) Top mobile network operators • timescale for operators to run out of profit
Section B: Mobile Web; 3G
1) Active mobile-broadband subscriptions worldwide
2) Top countries for mobile-broadband penetration (3G subscriptions) (NEW)
3) Top countries for mobile Web users: China (NEW) • Japan
4) Mobile browsing v desktop browsing
5) Most popular mobile browsers
6) Mobile-only Web users
7) Internet-ready mobile handsets
8) High-speed mobile networks
9) Unlimited data plans and cost of data
• 7, 8 and 9 are seen as the drivers of mobile Web and mobile media growth.
Section C: Mobile marketing, advertising and messaging
1) SMS - the king of mobile messaging
2) Mobile email, instant messaging and MMS
3) Global messaging revenues
4) The impact of OTT messaging services
5) Application to person (A2P) messaging.
6) Expenditure on mobile advertising and marketing worldwide
7) Mobile advertising in Japan, US, China
8) Top mobile ad networks
9) Consumer reaction to mobile ads
10) Why advertisers need a mobile-friendly site
Section D: Consumer mobile behavior
1) What do consumers use their mobiles for? (US, Western Europe and Japan).
2) Consumers, favorite mobile activities in the US
3) Consumers, favorite mobile activities in China
4) Mobile search activity
Section E: Mobile apps, app stores, pricing and failure rates
1) Number of mobile apps and downloads
2) Revenue from apps
3) Proliferation of app stores
4) Demand for app stores
5) Most used mobile apps (US)
6) Declining price of mobile apps
7) App failure rates
Section F: Mobile payment, including m-commerce, near-field communications/contactless payments, m-ticketing and m-coupons
1) Mobile payments (m-payments)
2) Top countries for m-payments
3) NFC tap & go payments
4) Mobile commerce (m-commerce)
5) Mobile shopping consumer behavior
6) Top m-commerce retailers
7) Mobile tickets (m-ticketing)
8) Mobile coupons (m-coupons)
Section G: Mobile financial services (MFS) and m-banking
1) Users of MFS (m-banking, m-wallets, remittance etc)
2) MFS, money transfers and banking the unbanked in Asia and Africa
3) Mobile banking (m-banking) in the West
4) Money transfers outpacing m-banking
Section H: Venture capital (VC) investment in mobile
1) Mobile companies attracting most VC investment
2) Most active VCs in mobile sector
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• Guide to mobile industry awards • Check out the video case studies: Global Mobile Awards • WSA Mobile •
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• Guide to mobile ad networks • Latest ad network profiles: Hands; • Twinpine •
• Guide to mobile agencies • Latest agency profiles: Pontomobi • The Hyperfactory •
• Guide to mobile industry awards • Check out the video case studies: Emmas • WSA Mobile •
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• The big compendium of global mobile stats
• Most popular content on mobiThinking in 2012
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Dear spammers, don’t bother leaving a comment. Comments are post moderated, so any self-promotional or SEO-orientated comments won’t ever be published. P.S. Google’s spiders aren’t that stupid, they always catch you in the end. And then you will have to contact every website to get your comments removed to try to salvage your search ranking – doh!
@Joe Lutz – Check: Agence de Regulation des Telecommunications (ART).
@ jennifer – Sorry we have no idea what % of subscribers use their phone for international calls? Analysts don’t seem to publish data on calls, even though people use mobile phones for calls much more than anything else.
@Habibullah Khan – if you are prepared to pay most analyst houses should be able to help with subscribers and SMS use per country. Otherwise you will need to do the research yourself. The country regulators are always the best place to start for national mobile stats.
Sorry for the delay in responding. It’s takes a while to filter the legit comments among the mountain of spam.
Hi
I need the data and stats of Mobile Phone Subscibers and SMS by Countries wise.
Please help.
thanks
Do you know what % of subscribers use their phone for international calls? Originating country info would be ideal.
Are there stats of mobile device users in Cameroon/Cameroun? Please let me know the link or stat. I love your website, and spread the news about it all the time!
Joe
@James @Ryan @James J @Kuhinje @ Lesleyanne – glad to be of assistance.
@mobile casinos – in many developing countries mobile has already surpassed PC as the main way to access the Web
@Darren – sorry we don’t have any details on operator churn. We have tried to source, but not freely available.
@Dave Marutiak – please get in touch, we are always interested in new stats – editor(at)mobiThinking.com
@ystat – many operators are uncooperative when it comes to sharing information such as this.
@Bruce – It is assumed that the majority of mobile phone users make calls, so research companies often do not include this information.
@Anonymous – sorry we do not track stats for camera-phone usage.
@Tom – we will see if Localytics have updated these stats.
@Anonymous – most apps stores seem reluctant to share any information that would help marketers make informed decisions.
@Anonymous – have you tried our mobile ad network guide: http://mobithinking.com/mobile-ad-network-guide
Wow! There is some great statistics about mobile applications here!
The figures for Android are staggering, they are catching up to Apple.
With the mobile smartphone users almost doubling since last year, no wonder why the demand for mobile casinos have exploded the last few years. If this growth pace keeps up, it's just a matter of time before the mobile web users will overtake the market share from desktop web browsing users.
Please can anyone assist by pointing me to some data that shows how switching between mobile providers has changed year by year (specifically interested in the impact of number protability regulation changes)? Thanks, Darren.
WOW !! Huge information !! Thanks for this useful statistics. I'm a telecommunication engineer and it'll help me a lot in my research.
If you like, we have tons of information to add to your mcommerce section on the growth and diversity of mobile consumer barcode readers and applications.
This website is full of very useful material. I'd like to thank site owners!
Thanks for information. SMS is still of king messages, but advertising messages and other notifications needs to be carefully crafted. SMS can be too intrusive for advertisements.
I'm working for the statistics division for my Island country. We wanted to know the number cell phones users (customer) our telecom service's, in our developing nations case there would be only one *** Telecom. So we contacted them and what happend was they counted the number cellphones (handsets) that they sold annually and reported back to us. This was back in 2006, at the time the *** Telecom was the only place that you could purchase a cellphone. Six years later when almost every electronic store on Island sells a variety of cellphone brands, the numbers that were reported to us didn't make sense. So we questioned them about drastic drop and their response was "the numbers have dropped due to the fact they are not the only enterprise selling celphones", which was true, but what we were interested in finding out was the number cellphone subscribers they serviced last yearand previous years before that. They reported back to us that they don't keep a history (data) on cellphones. So they told us that there was no way to find out how many customers they serviced last year or even the previous year before that, which didn't also make sense. So could some one share with us the method that can be used to find out the number cellphone subcribers a telecom services a year at least an annual average.
In the chart showing what users use their mobiles for, I didn't see anywhere a line for MAKING TELEPHONE CALLS. How many people actually use them for THAT? And is there any data showing how many use themn ONLY for making calls? Thanks.
Hey,
For a project that I am currently working on in college, I need to get exact and reliable stats on the
1)number of pictures clicked/taken on mobile phones of different kinds all over the world each year.
2)total number of pictres clicked on all sorts of camera all over the world each year.
This info will do a lot of help.
anyone is welcome to provide some reliable info / stats.
Thnx!!!
The Localytics failure stats seem particularly interesting - would be good to see how they have fared through 2011 and H1 2012. It seems every day that new apps and companies are springing up and would be of interest to see how 'sticky' these apps actually are as competition increases
Hello,
I would like to know if it is possible to see how many people reviewed apps in the iphone, ipad... (not downloaded), is it any statistics to see this? :)
Hello,
Very informative article. I am interested in finding the mobile advertising CPM rates. Where can I find this information? I need this information for the top 30 countries with the most mobile 3G subscribers. I know that each country varies with this price.
Please help me!
Thanks you for this comprehensive analysis. Keep up with update of this info. It would be pretty interesting to see how percent relation has changing, especially in OS field (Symbian, IOS, android relation).
Has anyone ranked mobile operators by market share? i.e. China Mobile 50% of market in China would rank higher than Vodafone with 30% market share in UK.
This is definitely a great post. With all the information provided from reliable sources it definitely means that you have exhausted all means to give accurate information to your readers. Great job!
I'm doing some research involving mobiles and this was totally invaluable. Really great, thanks!
Hi,
Would like to inquire if you have estimates for the following data please in Southeast Asia:
1) Total Data Enabled Phones
2) Total Features PHones
3) Total Smartphones
4) Total 3G phones
5) Total Non-data enabled
6) Total Android PHones
The data should be for all of Southeast Asia. Thanks!
how do you cite this information.
That is a real great website, article and valuable information. Many thanks. However, I'm interested in more details and statistical information about SIM cards global and regional, likewise the projections of SIM cards 2/3 G in different regions and countries given the number of GSM subscribers in those countries for sales projections in 2012,2013,....etc. Where and how I can find these info?
Thanks,
HK
Email: hashem.kotby@yahoo.com
This is interesting, but I'd like to know more on what type of texts people send, and what things they use the most when texting; such as phatic comunication and abbreviations. What age group texts the most, as well?
Hi Sir,
How are you???
I found http://mobithinking.com does provided important news regards mobile Marketing in Vietnam.
Hence,I am writing to inquiry some information, hope that you could provide some advise.
Please see the following:
- Number or Mobile in Vietnam and penetration percentage (versus total population)
- 3G / GPRS / WIFI users in the country and penetration percentage (versus total population)
- Smart phones % / Feature phones
- Nokia / iPhone / Android / iPad etc split
- Impressions or PVs levels
- Any information on usage? Where do they go i.e. Social Media, versus Content Download, versus News etc...
Appreciated if you could give some advise.
Thanks,
Mr Lim
Lot of great info! BTW, as far as mobile goes, business are still in the dark about QR codes and how having a mobile website is much more beneficial than an app.
Looking forward to ad companies other than Google to make things more available on mobile.
hanks for posting this information
It will be very helpful for mobile applications developers
Hi Can you please help me out with the percentage of subcribers in Indian Metros( Delhi,Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai) using handsets,Smartphones and Tablets >?
Also other information related to this will be highly appreciated ..Thanks in advnace
All of my questions settled-thanks!
As a SEO accredited specialist I am very interested how the mobile market will unfold. I think the market is small compared to even a year from now where projections are going to be 50% higher for mobile users. As pointed out imagine the impact of the difference between a text message which on average is read in 4 seconds then the time it takes for a recipient to read an email
The source I found for the SMS quote was from Mobile Squared (UK Research company -http://mobilesquared.co.uk/). They have a graphic in a white paper they produced called "Conversational Advertising”.
Great content. As a web developer what i know is that i got more and more request for responsive web design adaptable to mobile devices.
This data is incredible. Thanks a ton for these figures put here.
@all – thanks for all your comments, we’re glad the mobile stats compendium comes in useful.
@Rose @ Anonymous – mobiThinking is happy for you to quote from any of our content, assuming you credit us and link back, but if you are using statistics from a particular analyst group you should always cite the original source of the data. Most of the content here is publicly available information, so if your activity is journalistic, academic or non-profit-making then we wouldn’t expect any analyst group to mind you using the stats, correctly and sourced, as all publicity is good publicity. However if your activity paid-for you should probably ask permission to reuse the stats. Also we usually concentrate on global stats, if you want data on a particular country, then try the local telecom regulator. The author is the mobiThinking editor Andy Favell, but he prefers that you just cite mobiThinking.
@Sergio – estimates and forecasts for mobile payments vary greatly, as so many elements remain unknown e.g. will NFC payments take off, take off slowly or take off really quickly? Also the definitions of what constitutes mobile payments varies a lot from research group to research group. But however analysts define mobile payments, m-commerce (i.e. purchasing goods and services via the mobile Web/app) will only be a part of the story. m-commerce (probably) does include NFC payments and other mobile ticketing or money transfers (i.e. banking-type transactions initiated via mobile), for example.
Hi, Can I Copy and Share these facts.
Cannot reconcile most statistics seem to indicate that mobile payments will acount for around 280 Billion $ in the US market (about 25% of the world market) by 2016 yet some stats (See Nov. Forrester) quote just over 31 Billion by 2016. Am I missing something?
i do not close this tab. i am hired by a telecom company as a technical writer, although i am do not have a technical background. i refer to this page for a lot of my writing as well as for understanding the scenario. thanks. :)
Your team has put together a wonderful site full of resources we can all tap into. We will definitely be sharing this content with our group. And all the credit goes to your hard work.
Thanks again.
Judy
I appreciate your post. I also wrote that SMS advertising provides a cost effective method of targeting promotions to specific customer profiles. You might want to remind customers of specific events or promotions, but for whatever reasons, SMS allows you to pass information directly to the right customer at very affordable prices and fast delivery.
I agree that very soon the m-banking will surpass the conventional banking activities in India as well.
very credible information.
Hi, I am doing a porject regarding the smartphone usage in Singapore and I want to use statistics this article has mentioned. Hence, can i know the name of the author so that I can do citation for this?
Thanks.
@everyone – Thanks for all the comments, it’s appreciated. If you find it useful, please help spread the word and take a look at mobiThinking’s other content, for example, take our look at brand-new mobile cities guide: http://mobithinking.com/mobile-city-project
@Anonymous – we will investigate if there is any data on operators/manufacturer relationships, but suspect it may be confidential.
@rwk – we don’t know of any resource or methodology to estimate the share of SIM-unlocked phones, but will investigate.
@Mohamed Sami – please go ahead. Please cite the original source of the data as well as the mobiThinking global mobile stats compendium, with a link back.
@Amit – This would make a very interesting and lengthy debate, but we’re not sure mobiThinking is ready to take on the challenge – but we will consider it.
Very exhaustive information on Mobile phones and its usage around the world.It will act as reference material. Thanks for publishing such important and useful statistics.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
Just starting out on simple, tiny web ap - never knew the number of users was already so HUGE!!!
Thanks for your valuable tools and information - appmakr.com and other sites ought to be paying you to present this info too.
Do you happen to know of any sort of Phone-Operator Channel Map? Which explains which phone makers have relationships with which Telco/Mobile Operators?
Any information would be great :)
Hi, this is great research and information, i'm working on Strategy and i want to use some of these data as reference
could I ?
Thanks for keeping this amazing source of information always updated: truly invaluable.
Would you know of a resource or methodology to estimate the share of SIM-unlocked phones (especially smartphones)?
Thanks
This is very informative indeed. But i wish to know as to why people today spend a large percentage of their hard earned money on buying mobile phones and the services related therein. And why do we expect the handset to last only a year or two. Is that value for money? Have we as consumers been completed deluded by systamatic brainwashing done by overwhealming blurbs.
Your analysis is outstanding....
@Max. It varies greatly. It is very difficult to guess how much a retailer would spend on a mobile app, without knowing more about their intentions. Is it a Web app or a native app? It also depends on how sophisticated the app is – does it include m-commerce? If it is a native app the price climbs rapidly the more types of handset the app will work on. Personally I’d expect a basic, but functional retail download app on one or two platforms to start at $100K in development costs. Then there’s all the cost of promoting the app... could be the same again. Anyone else like to help with this?
@ Tapas, sorry we don't have handset share for all countries. All we can say for sure is that one third of handsets sold globally are Nokia.
@ N.Kumar. Sorry we don’t have any more information on the Indian market, other than that which is included in this guide: http://www.mobithinking.com/guide-mobile-web-India, which was published one year ago.
@ Anonymous, sorry we don’t have any data on age of people who download wallpapers/video of models in swimsuits or similar content.
@Kate – different research analysts use different definitions, sources of data and algarythms for calculating estimates of future spend. It isn’t unusual for projections for the same thing to be wildly different. While there is some overlap between m-payments and m-commerce, they are not the same (usually). M-payments would include m-ticketing and m-vouchers for example which I personally wouldn’t include in m-commerce if redeemed in store… m-commerce, I consider to be sales of goods and services via a mobile site or mobile app.
@researcher#1, @Anonymous – Please cite the mobiThinking global mobile stats compendium, with a link back. The author is the mobiThinking editor Andy Favell, but he prefers that you just cite mobiThinking. But you should also cite the original source of the data – in this case the mobile subscriber numbers the source is the ITU.
plz provide some insights and forcasts for mobile advertisement scenario in india.its present status,Usage pattern(as in what format of mobile advertisement is consumed the maximum)
please tell me nokia india market share in 2011
I am conducting a study on telecommunication Industry. I am looking for a statistics about how many are the current/actual cellphone / mobile phone user up to at least year 2010. It seems that I got the figure in this website. May I cite your blog then?
I was wondering how much do you think a retailer with annual revenues of around 700 mil would spend on a mobile app?
This is wonderful information. I'm writing a paper about cell phones (texting in particular) and these statistics would be perfect. Might i suggest you add the contributors/authors who wrote this page so that I among other may more professionally cite your information.
Hi, i wish to understand, what is the %age of people who download wallpapers/video of Models in Swimsuit's and similar content
This is great information consolidation! I was wondering how you reconcile the discrepancy between the Juniper esitmate for $170B in 2011 in m-payments (representing it says only 5% of retail ecommerce) and then later the point about ABI's estimate for $117B by 2015 for m-commerce (which it says represents 8% of ecommerce total). ???
@ Stan – we believe that revenue from AdMob was included in Google’s $1billion, but it appears to only be a “small” proportion. In the earning call when this was announced @17:14 Patrick Pichette CFO says: “I just want to add one fact regarding the new disclosures that Jonathan just gave you. Obviously this is revenues from two different angles of our business and with it we recognize in some cases some small overlaps so for example the AdMob revenues are obviously included both in the mobile number because it is a mobile product and in display because it is a display product. These are very small but I wish to clarify this out for every body.” See: http://mobithinking.com/blog/google-one-billion
We have been tracking the IDC estimates for the shares of the mobile ad market with interest. The amount that IDC revised the market share for the networks over a three month period causes some concern about IDC’s methodology. In September IDC told Business Week that Google and AdMob’s 2010 market share would be 21 percent and Apple’s would be 21 percent of the US mobile ad market. Three months later IDC told Business Week that Google/AdMob’s 2010 share would be 59 percent and Apple’s would have 8.4 percent of the US mobile ad market. If the ad networks are not briefing IDC… then why not? If the ad networks are briefing IDC… then why the huge discrepancy in the numbers?
Thanks for all the great info. However, I think the $1 billion given out by Google in August is no longer operative for Admob revenue. They said they were on track to hit a billion. Since then in December IDC revised the numbers according to Olga Kharif in BusinessWeek:
"Google, owner of the world's most popular search engine, will widen its lead in the $877 million U.S. market for mobile advertising, ending the year with a 59 percent share, according to research firm IDC." (That makes their share $517 million or half of their original claim.)
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2010/tc2010123_780712....
@Ken @Emma - Thanks and glad to be of service.
@Mattius and others - Thanks for all other comments and suggestions. They're all on the to-do list.
@Alex - good luck with the paid for round-up of mobile stats - is it as good as what mobiThinking gives away here for free?
Thanks you for this comprehensive list! You saved me about a month of frustration!
First of all, many thanks for the great summary. This saves my time on mobile market research.
I think that what Patrick was referring to is smartphone OS share among smartphone subscribers in US. According to comScore MobileLens, smartphone OS share of 3-month average ending September 2010 was the following and there were 58.7MM smartphone subscribers in US. So, you can estimate the number of users of each OS as follows:
Smartphone OS share (# users inMM)
RIM 37.3% (21.9)
Apple 24.3% (14.3)
Google 21.4% (12.6)
Microsoft 10.0% ( 5.9)
Palm 4.2% ( 2.5)
Google's share is growing in a fast pace after introduction of Android. Google is eating share of RIM and Microsoft. Considering that Android users are more likely PC users, this trend is understandable.
comScore MobileLens reports are issued quarterly. For the digest of the latest report, go to:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/7/comScore_Repo...
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