Mobile Web At A Glance [Statistics & Insights]

Accessing the internet on the Mobile handsets and smartphone devices are continuously on a rapid growth, and it is stated that it will definitely surpass the conventional PC access within five years of time. We shall have a look at some interesting and of course very useful statistics shown below.

1) The number of people accessing the mobile Internet is growing fast and is expected to overtake the PC as the most popular way to get on the Web within five years

The ITU (February 2010) expects mobile Web access – via laptops and smart mobile devices – to overtake desktop Web within the next five years.
Strategy Analytics (March 2010) estimates that at the end of 2009 almost 530 million users browsed the mobile Web on their handset. This is forecast to rise to over 1 billion by 2015.IDC (December 2009) estimates there were more than 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009; this will pass the 1 billion mark by 2013.

According to the mobiThinking note: The reason experts believe it is inevitable that mobile access to the Web will overtake PC access at some point (assuming the present expansion of 3G networks and availability of Internet-ready phones continues) is that mobile phone penetration outnumbers fixed Internet users 5:2. In the developed world, only 21 percent of people have Internet access, lowest in Africa at 9.6 percent. The price of fixed broadband in developing countries remains prohibitively expensive. (all figures from the ITU estimates, October 2010)).

2) There are more mobile Internet users in China than any other country

The China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) reports (July 2010): There are 277 million mobile Web users in China, up 43 million in six months. This amounts to 65.9 percent of total web users in China 420 million, the majority of these also access the Web via PC or laptop, but 11.7 percent of Web users exclusively use mobile to access the Web (this works out about 49 million – or more than the number of people that live in Spain).

At this rate there will soon be more mobile Internet users in China than there are people in the US – the world’s third largest nation. For more analysis see: Why Asia will (continue to) dominate the mobile Web

3) A much higher percentage of Japanese people use the mobile Internet than any other country, according to official stats

Japan has 121,246,700 mobile subscribers (95 percent of the population) of which 120,030,000 have 3G handsets (99 percent of handsets) and 98,683,500 (81 percent of mobile users) are mobile Internet subscribers (TCA, Japan Statistics Bureau, June 2011).

According to mobiThinking note: this means that 77 percent of Japanese people have access to the mobile Internet via their handset, but the number regular users could be considerably less.

4) Many mobile Web users are mobile-only, according to On Device Research

In many developing nations, the majority of mobile Web users are mobile-only, highest include Egypt at 70 percent and India at 59 percent. • In many developing nations, the mobile-only tend to be under 25.

In developed nations, including the US at 25 percent, a large minority of mobile Web users are mobile-only. • In developed nations, in the US particularly, many mobile-only are older people and many come from lower income households

In Africa the 85 percent of the mobile-only Web users access the Web with a feature phone. • In Africa the top mobile activities for mobile-only users are: downloading games (55 percent); downloading music (54 percent); social networking (52 percent); search (48 percent); email (46 percent).

Many mobile-only Web users do not have a bank account, in India this is 57 percent of the mobile-only.

5) Almost one in five people have access to fast mobile Internet (3G or better) services

The ITU (October 2010) estimates that at the end of 2010 there was 940 million 3G subscriptions (that’s 18 percent of total subscriptions)

3G networks are now available in 143 countries and some countries such as Sweden, Norway, Ukraine and United States are already moving to 4G.

“Mobile is an annualized run rate of over US$1billion. This means that the people are accessing our products and services through their mobile phones are adding a billion dollars annually to our existing revenue streams. Clearly this is the future of search on the Internet. More people in more countries are coming online from smartphones. Our mobile search queries have grown five times over the last couple of years,” – Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Google (October 2010).