Fueled by Emerging Markets, Mobile Devices Pass 4 Billion Connections Worldwide

Backing up healthy predictions for the mobile market, a Bellevue, Washington-based trade association this week announced that the wireless industry now has 4 billion connections worldwide to devices such as smartphones.

 

Officials at 3G Americas LLC, which represents mobile operators and manufacturers, say the estimate represents about 60 percent of people on Earth.

 

According to Marisol Gomez, a regional analyst for the Americas at Informa Telecoms & Media, the firm that carried out the study on behalf of 3G, millions of consumers in some nations now are seeing connectivity to the world for the first time through wireless and changing their economic, social and political fortunes.

 

Specifically, Gomez said, the Latin America and Caribbean region is seeing steady consumer growth with 16 percent year-on-year growth as subscription numbers are expected to reach in excess of 440 million, equating to 76 percent penetration.

 

“The market in the region to have shown the greatest number of net additions in the year was unsurprisingly Brazil (19 million), but in terms of annual growth, we note that Peru has been a particularly fast growing market with 4.6 million net additions, representing annual subscription growth of 33 percent,” Gomez said.

 

The mobile market’s potential long has been tied to emerging markets.

 

As TMCnet reported, one a London-based IT market analysis firm, Ovum, is calling for emerging markets and data services to fuel global mobile growth to the tune of 5.63 billion mobile connections by 2013. The figure marks a 43 percent increase from this year.

 

Specifically, according to Steven Hartley, a senior analyst at Ovum (News - Alert), an increasing share of customers in emerging markets will go to new, rapidly expanding players such as Zain and Orascom.

 

“The result will be a raft of new, large scale global players by 2013,” Hartley said. “Today’s European-based giants will face increasingly intense competition from equally large or larger competitors at both global and local levels. Efficiency and maximizing synergies from their scale will be the critical success factor for both the old and new heavyweights.”

 

China and India, as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh are expected to grow at about 12 percent up to 2013, with market penetration rising from only 40 percent in 2008 to 67 percent in 2013.

 

Ovum also expects the Asia-Pacific and Africa to add to what it calls a “staggering” number of connections.

 

Right now, 3G says, more than 100 operators worldwide, including most industry leaders, have announced expectations to migrate networks to long-term evolution from 2010 and beyond.

 

According to Chris Pearson, president of 3G, third-generation technologies are evolving, and the GSM operator today has a clear path toward LTE (News - Alert).

 

“In addition to the evolution to LTE by GSM operators, LTE is proving to be the technology choice for CDMA operators as well,” Pearson said.