3.4 Billion Mobile Phones - A marketing incentive?

Trillion with a T, the Newest Giant Industry has Arrived: the Money and Meaning of Mobile



"We have the newest Trillion dollar baby, and it is growing really fast. In this blog posting I only focused on the big picture items, and didn't even touch upon the content and services that are in this space. I'll do that in a separate blog posting soon. But yes, now the numbers to remember for 2009 - there are four billion mobile phone subscribers on the planet. That means 3 billion unique mobile phone owners, who carry around 3.4 billion mobile phone handsets everywhere they go.'

"The industry sells 1.2 billion new mobile phones every year. The phone in your pocket is as powerful as a supercomputer only 20 years ago or the laptop that is 5 years old, and the capabilities and functions grow at breathtaking speed, partly because the replacement cycle globally is down to 15 months. There are 1.9 billion cameraphones in use today.'

For the first time now, the majority of internet access is from a mobile phone, no longer from a personal computer. Also for the first time, MMS multimedia messaging, or known as "picture messaging" has more users than the total users of email.

"Meanwhile, SMS text messaging continues its climb as the biggest data application in the world, used now by 3 billion people.'

"Mobile messaging is worth about 130 billion dollars. Mobile voice is worth about 600 billion dollars. The mobile data and content industries are worth about 70 billion dollars. The total mobile services industry is worth about 800 billion dollars. The handsets business is worth about 150 billion, and the network hardware rounds out the remainder, a bit under 50 billion, to bring our total to one Trillion (1,000 Billion) dollars."



"This year 2008, Nokia became the world's largest supplier of GPS devices. Its only an added feature on premium Nokia phones, and not every user even cares to use the positioning technology. Yet its there on the phone. But when the industry ships 1.2 billion new phones - yes, 3 million new phones ship every single day, Saturdays, Sundays and all holidays included - that gives it an enormous momentum and the ability to devour almost anything it wants. Oh, how about cameras you ask? Yes that too. The first mass market cameraphones were introduced in Japan in 2001, and Nokia has been the world's most common digital camera brand since 2004. Today the phone industry has shipped a cumulative 3 billion cameraphones, and the current installed base is 1.9 billion cameraphones. 57% of all mobile phones in use on the planet are cameraphones already. Oh, the stand-alone camera industry still lumbers along, selling now a little over 100 million stand-alone cameras but did you notice, since cameraphones appeared, two of the four camera giants have quit the camera business altogether. Minolta and Konica, no more in the camera biz. Shame. My first SLR was a Konica, they made great 35 mm film-based cameras - three decades ago.."