2.7 Billion phone subscrptions 2006 now verified by Informa

We blogged four months ago that the End-of-Year 2006 subscriber count for mobile phones in the world was 2.7 billion. At the time we could not cite an actual industry analyst with the number, as it was the current projection by my consultancy, TomiAhonen Consulting and based on the latest available subscriber numbers near the end of the year, and the projections of growth past those numbers. And as we wrote, the actual 2.7 Billionth user would be within an error of a few weeks before or after the turn of the year.

I have now seen the official count by Informa, the telecoms analyst company considered to provide the official subscriber counts, which is used by the various industry associations, manufacturers etc. Informa's report, Mobile Market Status 2007 gave the final count for the end of the year 2006 of mobile phone subscriptions at 2,704,661,000. So with a bit of ronding off its 2,705 million, or just past 2.7 billion. This can now be used as also the official source whenever any of our readers want to reference the 2.7 B number (but by now, April 2007, the count is just about 2.8 B, but thats another story). As a percentage of total human population, it means there is a mobile phone subscription for 41.4% of the human race.

Informa also gave the final count of new phones sold last year, which was 942,700,000, so we were nearly at a billion mobile phones sold last year, but didn't quite make that mark. Its most likely we'll pass the billion phones sold per year level this year. 

Very interestingly, Informa has been reporting that there are multiple subscriptions in the market, but have not broken it down before in any report that I've seen, until now. But in this report, Informa also tells us that out of all mobile phone users, 28.8% have two or more subscription (and in most cases this also means two phones). Obviously in countries like Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong, UK etc where mobile phone penetration is at over 125% per capita, the proportion of phone owners to have two or more phones is near 40%. But even across Europe, now well over a third of the population who have a phone, have in fact at least two subscriptions and mostly also thus two phones. Its another phenomenon we've blogged about several times, but the sheer size of it may surprise our readers. As we reported for example last Autumn, even in America the level is at 18% of all phone owners, who have two or more subscriptions (according to the CTIA, the American industry association for cellular telecoms)

So if we want to report on the unique users of mobile phones, who have one or more mobile subscriptions, then the count is obviously well below 2.7 billion. Informa tells us that the unique populatoin of mobile phone users was 2.1 billion at the end of 2006. So already 600 million people on the planet have two or more phone subscriptions.

I'm doing some updates of my analysis of phones and will do a follow-up on these numbers and their impacts also soon. But I wanted to post this data as it is fresh with me today.

FREE INFORMATION - for those who would like to understand the basics of the mobile telecoms industry, its current size, replacement cycles, second subscriptions, mobile content revenues, SMS texting usage etc, I have written a concise 2 page Thought Piece on Size of Mobile Industry. Send me an e-mail to  tomi at tomiahonen dot com   and I'll send it to you for free.

Comments

[Colm Larkin]

Hi Tomi,

"As a percentage of total human population, it means there is a mobile phone subscription for 41.4% of the human race."

While your wording makes the stat correct, comparing subscriptions to total population is a bit misleading since so many people have 2. It's a better comparison when you use the number of unique people with mobile phones (2.1B).

This gives you the stat that 32% of everyone on earth has a mobile phone. At almost 1/3rd that's pretty amazing.

Cheers

[emlak]

thank you very nice topic, thankks :)

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi Colm and emlak

Thank you for visiting and posting your comments

Colm - good point, but I do make that later in the blog entry, that for the first time we have a count of second subscriptions and the unique human population of phone owners is 2.1 billion. We've been early proponents of that measure, and have highlighted the fact in various postings (and in fact in all of my books) that there is an increasing part of the population who have two or more subscriptions (and often also phones).

emlak - thank you.

Thanks for visiting our site and commenting

[Jamie]

Interesting statistics. So how many mobile base stations do you think are in China to support all their mobile users?

And how many will they have to add over next five years?

Jamie

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Jamie

Good question. The rule of thumb says for a mid-sized country like UK, Italy, Spain etc has about 10,000 base stations for one cellular network. Very large countries like USA for example, either in area or population, will have much more.

I saw a recent article (could have been Financial Times or Wall Street Journal or something like that) which actually had a quotation on the number of base stations they expect to deploy for the 3G upgrade in China, and it was in the tens of thousands of base stations, but sorry, I didn't clip that article...

But yes we're looking at a very large amount of network infrastructure to be deployed. The interesting part is that for most of Europe (densest mobile networks) the 3G upgrade is done for the large part, so the network vendors like Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens, Lucent-Alcatel, Nortel etc as well as the Chinese domestic vendors Huawei and ZTE etc - there now is good capacity to fulfill the Chinese needs. It would have been difficult to add that capacity need two or three years ago...

Thanks for writing

Tomi Ahonen :-)