Ten Findings out of Morgan Stanley's massive Mobile Internet Report

When you read a 424 page industrial report full of stats and facts its very easy to start to lose focus and keep in mind, what are the true gems of new insights in that report. And this is certainly the risk in Morgan Stanley's brilliant free report Mobile Internet, out today, which is indeed overloaded with stats, graphs, tables and data. So I did Tweets of the main points that struck me, as I was reading it, and conveniently, they amounted to ten items. I will cover each here and give a bit of background and significance to those ten items.

First, Morgan Stanley made the point (not original to them) that current mobile phones reflect a new generation of computing, similar to transitions in computing in the past. Morgan Stanley counted 5 shifts - very similar to my thinking here at this blog a year ago - but the amazing part that I missed, but Morgan Stanely points out, is that with each cycle, the total reach of computing had grown by a factor of 10. So the mainframe based computing world reached about 10 million, the desktop PC world passed 100 million users before the internet PC came along, which passed 1 billion users, but the mobile internet is headed to pass 10 billion users. Fascinating pattern in this growth.

Then Morgan Stanley pointed out that the modern smartphone of today is as powerful as a desktop of 8 years ago. Again, this is not news to our regular followers who will remember my famous presentation to the Canadian Industry when it celebrated 20 years of cellphones (and asked me to give a forecast into the next 20 years haha). But yeah, I said then that the (2005 era) smartphone was as powerful as a desktop of about ten years before. The gap is closing a bit, but the theory is the same. Nice to see this in Morgan Stanley's report.

That acceleration in mobile, how it is catching up on the legacy PC world, is also pointed out by Morgan Stanley, and they use the measure of mobile internet traffic vs PC based internet traffic, which lags by 9 years now, but is closing. It is again a phenomenon which we here have told our readers from the total national internet use of Japan, to individual services such as Flirtomatic.

Then how about that smartphone? Is it a 'real computer' - and what of those 'heretics' who talk of the mobile phone being 'better' at some things than a traditional PC such as a laptop. Haha, now Morgan Stanley has joined in the choir (welcome). Our long-term fans know I was first to iterate that, back in my second book, and have listed more than these, but it is nice to see that Morgan Stanley said that at least in four areas, the smartphone is better than the PC, to consume internet type content, including email, VoIP/voice calls (like Skype), social networking, and news. Very nice.

Now, while I have been expecting this number at some point, I didn't know we are seeing it in this quarter. The iPhone and iPod Touch are just this quarter growing to become the second most widely used portable gaming platform - yes overtaking the Playstation Portable (PSP) and now only trailling Nintendo. Haha, and yes, clearly one of the main uses of the iPhone is gaming (Morgan Stanley also show that most popular paid content at the iPhone is games related) and no doubt there are many N-Gage executives at Nokia who feel like screaming.. "if only.."

Now, while the Morgan Stanley report was very dismissive of RIM and Blackberry, and clearly gave far too much emphasis on the iPhone, and more attention to Google Android than the Blackberry, there was one interesting number about Blackberry which is no doubt comforting to all over at RIM Headquarters in Waterloo. Blackberry has over 40% of the global enterprise market share of smartphones. If that seems 'too small' to you - a global number - bear in mind some of the biggest economies with many global conglomerates - Japan, South Korea and China for example - are tiny, almost non-existent markets for Blackberry, due to the domestic carriers/operators and their domestic handset makers making 'business phones.' Yes one in four big business smartphones is a Blackberry, the rest is divided by Nokia E-Series and other Symbian phones, Windows Mobile, Palm, and several other domestic smartphone makers in Japan, China, South Korea. The market share of iPhones and Android phones in the enterprise space is totally negligable. As to the relevance of this, it helps explain why RIM has the 'most secure' home base of its market share, as I explained in my 'what decides smartphone market shares' blog of the summer. But yes, nice to see the number quantified. Wow. 40% globally, that must be something near 80% in the USA.... (Oh, and if you wanted to find regional phone market shares, this report has those too..)

There was a lot of industry income numbers. One very fascinating tidbit was that of the total (fixed) internet content revenues of 91 Billion dollars (this number excludes the broadband and dial up monthly fees), 5% was all that was contributed by the content revenues for sales of digital content, such as music, gaming, news etc. That is 4.5B dollars in absolute numbers. Compare that with the mobile internet, where content revenues were worth 37 Billion dollars, and out of that, digital content formed 54% or 20 Billion dollars. In practical terms, who cares? If you want to collect any kind of content revenues, mobile today delivers 4 times more revenues than the fixed internet. Or in other words, sell your music, gaming and news on a phone, not on the PC based internet...  I had been reporting that the number was bigger for mobile for many years now, but wasnt aware it had grown to 4 times bigger already. Very good news to the digital content industries. Out of almost 25 Billion dollars in total digital content incomes delivered online, over 80% is earned through the mobile phone. Yeah...

There was not much about SMS or MMS in the report, but they were not ignored. Just the report seemed to focus on the smartphones-based 'browsing' internet experience, and mostly looked at a 3G mobile data network technology as the bearer network. But there was a bit of SMS and MMS in the section on the Emerging World. One interesting data point was that out of the total global SMS traffic, 57% is generated in the Emerging World. For MMS traffic, the number is even more drastic - 80% is generated in the Emerging World. (Now do you understand why I keep obsessing about SMS, MMS - and WAP - for the Emering World?)

And of an individual detail - this was new info to me - in China already today, the newspaper industry has innovated in creating SMS and MMS versions of paid 'mobile newspapers' which are essentially headline services. How many use them? 40 Million paid users already. Hey, thats good news for any traditional periodicals publisher?

And I left my fave stat for last. The total number. The Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet Report of December 15, 2009, reports that the total value of the mobile data industry grew 20% this past year - this year of economic crisis when the global economy declined 5% - and mobile data total revenues reached 284 Billion dollars. This is now bigger than the 'total' PC internet economy, ie the internet content revenues, plus internet advertising revenues, plus all subscription fees ie broadband and dial-up monthly fees, combined. Those are worth roughly speaking 250 Billion dollars (may be even less, we have to see when the final numbers come in for those, but for example fixed PC based internet incomes did not grow this year, by some analysts they say they declined..).

This number includes SMS revenues of about 100 Billion and includes mobile advertising revenues of 3 Billion dollars this year (that number may also still be bigger, as mobile advertising is growing so strongly at this time, it is difficult for any analyst to nail the exact number..)

But think about it - when the world total expenditure declined by 5% and we faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression 80 years earlier, the global mobile data industry grew 20%. That means, that if we adjust for the economic decline, the 'actual' growth was equivalent to 25% year-on-year. WOW. Haven't we been telling you on this blog for years, that this is THE industry to be in. This mobile data opportunity is by far the best economic opportunity of our lifetimes.

Ok, the Report is very thorough and long and a treasure-trove for statistics and numbers. I may disagree with a given point here or there, and yes, when you publish such a report, at times there are some inconsistencies, etc, but hey, its a free report by Morgan Stanley. Go get yours now and download the full version with text and both slide sets. Then read it all. Remember that it is clearly US centric, and Tomi's view was that it over-emphasized the relevance of the iPhone and obsesses about 3G, but then also remember, that as Morgan Stanley is incredibly bullish on the mobile internet, this report barely mentions SMS, and all but ignores MMS and 2.5G and WAP. The 'real' opportunity is EVEN BIGGER than what Morgan Stanley tells us. Yeah, tell your kids to go study mobile data at college haha, this is the best career option too...

Now, while 424 pages is of course a lot to digest, if you feel that focusing only on the 'smartphones' and 3G based parts of the 'mobile internet' but ignoring the feature phones that also have browsers, and ignoring such massive data areas as MMS (worth 26 Billion dollars annually) or SMS (worth 100 Billion) or data dongles and datacards etc, then remember that I have a free 2 page document to explain the sizes of the 'mobile internet' according to all major different definitions. That is a nice free 2 page pdf document to add to the same place where you file the Morgan Stanley report. My 2 page document is called a Thought Piece on Mobile Internet and is available for free to all who request it via email, at this address tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com.

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