Lets Do 2014 Numbers for the Mobile Industry: Now we are at 100% Mobile Subscription Penetration Rate Per Capita Globally

Lets do the big mobile numbers blog. Where are we in mobile stats in 2014?

The mobile subscription rate is at or very very nearly at 100%. For 7.1 Billion people alive that means 7.1 Billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide. Not everyone has a mobile account or number - babies don't have mobile phones so some of us have two or more accounts. Hong Kong is past 200% penetration rate for example. But globally yes, we are now at 100%. 7.1 Billion mobile phone accounts in use worldwide.

SIZE IS HUGE

So first, some context. The PC. Take every type of PC, including desktops, laptops, netbooks and tablet PCs and add them together. What do we have? 1.5 Billion in use worldwide. Mobile is nearly 5 times larger. Televisions? Sure. We are now at 2 Billion TV sets in use globally. But mobile has 3.5 times users. What of 'paid' TV viewers - ie cable and satellite TV accounts? Thats only 1 Billion. Mobile has 7 times more paying customers. Landline phones? There are only 1.1 Billion of those left. Mobile is more than six times bigger.

Then lets talk about those numbers. 7.1 Billion mobile subscriptions is not 'unique users' and it is not 'handsets in use'. The number of unique users is now 4.5 Billion or 63% of all humans alive are actually users of mobile phones. The remaining 2.6 Billion accounts are second or third accounts for the same user. And many of us have two phones. What is the number of phones in use? We are at 5.4 Billlion mobile handsets in use around the world. So out of the unique user number (4.5 Billion) 900 million carry two phones. So 20% of us, one in five who has a mobile subscription or account, actually walks around with two phones (and at least two accounts).


MOBILE SUBCRIBERS END OF 2013
Total active mobile subscriptions or accounts . . . . 7.1B (was 6.7B in 2011, growth 6%)
Unique mobile users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 B (was 4.3B in 2011, growth 5%)
Actual mobile phones in use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 B (was 5.2B in 2011, growth 4%)
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2014
This data may be freely shared

MONEY IS ALSO HUGE

The industry grew 7% in total revenues last year and the global mobile industry is now worth 1.56 Trillion dollars annually. That breaks down so, that 1.15 Trillion is service revenues (our phone calls, messages, internet access, music, games, advertising, apps etc). 280 Billion is handset sales (mostly smartphones) and another 125 Billion is 'other hardware' that includes a wide range from networking equipment to accessories.

Of the service revenues those highly hyped smartphone apps are still only a tiny corner of the opportunity. The mobile operators/carrriers still make the majority of the service revenues and two giants dominate that space - voice calls and messaging. Voice calls were worth 673 Billion dollars in 2013 while messaging was worth 199 Billion dollars. And no most of that was not 'OTT services' like Whatsapp. SMS text messaging was worth 130 Billion dollars and MMS another 46 Billion dollars in 2013, for the lion's share of messaging revenue worldwide. Please note that an increasing portion of both SMS and MMS is now content (like voting for TV shows), advertising and commerce revenues (coupons etc).

HANDSETS

So lets talk phones. 5.4 Billion mobile phones in use worldwide. The industry sold 1.8 Billion new mobile phones just last year alone. And more than half of the new sales are now smartphones (990 million were in 2013). In the installed base, already 31% of all mobile phones in use are smartphones (1.7 Billion units) and this year will sell about 1.2 Billion more with roughly half going to replace older smartphones and half going to first-time smartphone owners. But before you lament those 'dumbphones' they aren't that dumb these days. 44% of all phones in use have WiFi capability. 67% can install apps via Java. Four out of five has a memory card slot. Nine out of ten phones in the world can receive MMS multimedia messages (And 100% can do SMS text messaging obviously).

The migration to smartphones continues at rapid pace. Three regions - advanced Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America have passed the mid-point so there are smartphones for more than half of the population. The Middle East is nearing the mid-point. Lagging in the migration rate come Latin America, developing parts of Asia, and Africa. As I've reported on this blog regularly in the 'Smartphone Bloodbath' series monitoring the market share wars on a quarterly basis, Android has now utterly won the smartphone platform war with over 80% of new sales. Apple's iPhone has peaked and is in gradual decline at about 15% with the remnant few percent split among Windows, Blackberry and miscellaneous others. In the installed base the past large sales of Symbian and Blackberry still place them ahead of Windows, with Windows lingering in fifth ranking among smartphone operating systems by actual devices in use. Android and iPhone obviously dominate the installed base as well.

MOBILE INTERNET

An easily-muddled statistic, the internet or 'browsing' user base and which platform they use is prone to very wild swings of legitimate reporting of the statistics. It depends on whether you count primary use or all use (many of us will access web content from several device types, our laptops, our tablets, our smartphones etc). And the reporting is often coming from systems which do not measure all use, or which miscalculate part of the use (often iOS measurements cannot differentiate between iPhones - ie smartphones vs iPads ie tablets and iPod Touch ie PDA uses). But when we allow multiple uses, and look at all 'browser' type of access to 'internet content' such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon etc - then the usage in 2013 was like this:

There are 2.9 Billion users of the internet when any device and type is allowed including accessing from internet cafe and other shared devices.

48% of the internet users will use both a PC of some kind (which includes tablets) and a mobile phone
42% will not use a PC and will only access the internet on a mobile phone (smartphone or dumbphone)
and 10% will not use a mobile phone and only access the internet on some type of PC (including tablet)

Of mobile phones used to access internet content, the numbers build like this. 1.6 Billion use a smartphone. 2.2 Billion use an HTML based mobile brower (including smartphones and dumbphones). And 2.6 Billion use any type of mobile browser including WAP and HTML (this of course therefore includes smartphones too). You can see there is a lot of chance to offer confusing and 'disagreeing' numbers just by browsing before we consider say app downloads.

MESSAGING OTT AND PEAK SMS

So the OTT revolution has really taken off led by Whatsapp. But still the total user base is modest. OTT services across all OTT types have only 1.4 Billion users. That compares with 5.8 Billion users of SMS and 3.3 Billion users of MMS. The total traffic, user count and even revenues of SMS still grew in 2013 while OTT services grabbed the majority of total mobile messaging traffic. The heavy users who send more than 100 messages per day will shift most of that traffic rather rapidly to more cost-effective (and user-friendly) messaging platforms. But even heavy Whatsapp users will usually not abandon SMS they only greatly diminish its use. For advertisers and brands, obviously, SMS is the only way to reach every economically viable person on the planet, with MMS a near-universal second choice.

MEDIA CONTENT

The total non-voice 'data' opportunity in mobile is now nearing 500 Billion dollars in value. 40% of that is now from messaging and 60% from 'value-add data' which includes media content, apps and many other elements like the sales commission from m-commerce. 290 Billion dollars is the total value of mobile media content. The big media opportunities in mobile are social media, TV and video, gaming, search, news and virtual goods. Music has passed its peak and mobile music revenues are now in decline. Several areas of smaller size are growing fast led by m-health and m-education. Smartphone apps are only a tiny slice of this space with most income earned by apps built for gaming.

MOBILE ADVERTISING

Then we have advertising. Mobile ads keep growing at rates of nearly 100% per year and across all mobile ad income types passed 30 Billion dollars in value in 2013. This includes the often-reported banner ad revenues and the less-often included messaging revenues and the in-app advertising. 

DIGITAL DIVIDE

And finally a few words about the so-called 'Rich World' vs the 'Emerging World'. The spoils of the digital miracle are not spread evenly. But even here the 'best story' in digital for the Emerging World is of course mobile. Of the 7.1 Billion mobile subscriptions, we in the 'West' have 2.1 Billion mobile subscriptions for a 175% mobile penetration rate. The Emerging World with 5.9 Billion people have 5.0 Billion subscriptions for an 85% penetration rate. In the Industrialized World 97% of all phones in use are cameraphones vs 76% in the Emerging World. 82% of the mobile subscriptions in the Industrialized Countries have migrated to 3G while only 18% of the accouns in the Emerging World have done so. 53% of handsets in the West are smartphones while only 21% in the rest of the world are so. And did you know many actually buy used handsets? Only 3% of mobile phones in the Industrialized World are second-hand phones (these tend to be hand-me-down phones we give to our young kids). But in the Emerging World 17% of all phones in use are second-hand phones (often shipped from more affluent countries).

SO WHO ARE THE BIG DOGS

Then lets do the 'if measured only by their mobile business' chart of the biggest players. So for example Apple we remove the Macs and iPads and iPods and iTunes, only the iPhone and its app store revenues. For Samsung we remove the flat screen TVs and PCs and all sorts of consumer electronics. For Vodafone we remove the fixed landline telecoms business etc. When we measure the largest companies on the planet by purely their mobile income we get this chart:

BIGGEST COMPANIES WHEN ONLY COUNTING THEIR MOBILE BUSINESS IN 2013

1 (3) Apple iPhone, USA, smartphones . . . . $ 112 B
2 (4) Samsung Galaxy, S Korea, handsets . $ 103 B
3 (1) China Mobile, China, operator . . . . . . . $ 91 B
4 (2) Verizon Wireless, USA, operator  . . . . $ 82 B
5 (5) AT&T Wireless, USA, operator . . . . . .  $ 65 B
6 (6) Vodafone Mobile, UK, operator . . . . . .  $ 58 B
7 (7) Telefonica Movil, Spain, operator . . . . . $ 52 B
8 (9) T-Mobile, Germany, operator . . . . . . . . $ 50 B
9 (8) NTT DoCoMo, Japan, operator . . . . . . . $ 49 B
10 (10) Orange Mobile, France, operator . . . .$ 44 B

Note: All except China Mobile in the above chart are 'virtual companies' with imaginary names to reflect their mobile businesses and their mobile branding.
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2014
This data may be freely shared

So the two big smartphone makers Apple and Samsung have kicked the big mobile operators from the top slots. No big surprise here, as the trend was clearly forming for the past few years. Meanwhile operators struggle with flat revenues or even declining revenues as voice calls and messaging revenues are under increasing threats from OTT services like Skype and Whatsapp.

ALL DATA IN THE ABOVE MAY BE FREELY SHARED

Please mention your source as TomiAhonen Almanac 2014 for any data you want to use. You don't have to ask for permission to quote any of the above numbers.

Thats what the world of mobile looks like in early 2014. If you need more data, I have just released the 2014 edition of the TomiAhonen Almanac which has now over 200 pages and over 100 charts and tables, like the above and much much more hard-to-find mobile data in a handly pocket-sized ebook that you can save onto your smartphone or tablet to keep all the latest mobile data always with you. The ebook TomiAhonen Almanac 2014 costs only 9.99 Euros and is available for immediate download only from this link. (Note currently it still shows the 2012 Almanac but obviously you'll get the brand new 2014 Almanac if you buy it). There is also a free edition of an older Almanac if you need rough numbers but don't care to have the latest specific details. See more at TomiAhonen Almanac 2014.

Comments

[AndThisWillBeToo]

@RA
"by Microsoft's idiotic decision to make them Intel only."

After you have just talked about upgrade path, backwards compatibility and all, how did you plan them to keep legacy Windows app compatibility on ARM?

[RottenApple]

@AndThisWillBeToo:

You know, there's such nice tools, called 'compilers'. As long as a program is well written it requires just one click on the 'compile' button to create a binary. And if ARM was supported that'd be all that needed to be done by a developer to get a working 'Windows for ARM' version.

Not rewriting the entire code because Metro is utterly incompatible with the desktop API.

[AndThisWillBeToo]

@RA

The whole point of including the desktop (pro version) is that you can keep running those same apps you have been running for last 10 years. In my case that includes few game titles, freeware picture editor and so forth. Do you really expect _any_ of those developers to dig their old source codes from 5+ years back and recompile? (especially if program in question was made by some company already out of business)
People in just about every forum (this included) have been blaming Win8 RT for being sold as "Windows" while it does not run _any_ legacy Windows programs. Same people would be doing just the same if Win8 Pro would run _all_ on Intel and _some_ on ARM. Consumers would be even more puzzled than they are today (and they are already today so puzzled it shows in sales).

GMAB.

[Siasa]

@WTL

You just confirmed that today it's not possible to write a web app with native class offline capability and doing that in a way that reaches 95-98% of the smartphone users. On Android you would probably need a new browser for that. On iOS it's not possible with Safari. With Safari it's not possible today to control the web apps one by one and choose exactly what to install or uninstall while not risking uninstalling everything if the browser is cleaned.

That can't be done with a web app today and you apparently can't even tell us when exactly that's going to be possible even for iOS. All the platforms would be needed if 95-98% coverage is wanted. Today that can be done with native apps.

Amazon account is not good enough simply because it can't reach practically all the app content there is. It also doesn't work for purchasing iOS web apps working just as well as the native ones in offline and controlled individually as well as the native apps.

Actually, you never even confirmed if the native web apps on iOS could multitasks. The limited multitasking is very handy on iOS. Can the native web apps use camera, multitask, play streamed music and use GPS while on background? Can that be done today? Can it be done today on Android with web apps? The native ones can do that and they can be used to reach 95-98% of the smartphones. Today. Not some day in the future but today.

[RottenApple]

@AndThisWillBeToo:

"People in just about every forum (this included) have been blaming Win8 RT for being sold as "Windows" while it does not run _any_ legacy Windows programs."

There's a huge difference between not being able to make any Windows application work at all. 'Upgrade path' doesn't mean to have full binary compatibility, it means to be able to make things work on the new platform with reasonable effort.

No, you wouldn't have gotten all those games but for most software that's still getting updates the situation would have resolved itself by now.

Despite the games issue that'd still be a lot better than what we have now: If you want to make desktop apps, you still have to do it the old fashioned way, if you want to make touch-centric apps, you are restricted to a toy UI that's useless for serious stuff - not to mention that it requires the least liked Windows version ever -, and you also got distribution restrictions along with it. Combined with Microsoft simply being too late it was a disaster just waiting to happen.

[Winter]

I think this is a good impression of the joys of the Windows 8 Metro interface.

https://www.eviscerati.org/comics/comic/hd/2013/01/Excess-Real-Estate

[WonTheLottery]

@Siasa
"With Safari it's not possible today to control the web apps one by one and choose exactly what to install or uninstall while not risking uninstalling everything if the browser is cleaned. "

Here's a very simple tutorial to help you understand Safari: http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-Website-Data-from-Safari-in-iOS

With Android Chrome is only available to manufacturers that license Google's Play Services, that's why there's an alternative cut-down browser on Android. If an Android device can access the Play Store it also gets Chrome, therefore users that can get native apps from the app store can also run web apps in Chrome.

"Amazon account is not good enough simply because it can't reach practically all the app content there is."

App content is dependent on the app not the payment method.

[Siasa]

@WTL

As your links says, working offline and removing the data is not easy enough and it can not replace the native apps in the current form it has. It's simply not going to work if it must be done from there. The right way to do it would be clicking the name or the icon of the web app and then removing the data from that way. You suggestion also doesn't prevent removing all the applications by accident if the browser is cleaned.

The native apps is the only way to do that well enough at the same time when 95-98% of the smartphones out there can be targeted. It's also clear that you don't even know the exact schedule when this will change. The current way of doing that is simply not good enough.

You can't pay any app with the Amazon method. Currently you can pay pretty much any app with either Google Play or with iTunes account. That makes those two superior compared to the Amazon account when purchasing apps is in question. Buying something else is a different matter.

[RottenApple]

@Siasa:

You repeat yourself. But it's pointless to constantly pointing out today's limitations when discussing tomorrow's developments.

You also have no clue how much of a financial drag native app development is. That alone will steer things towards web apps sooner or later.

Constantly repeating 'but today...' is not going to change this.

[Siasa]

@RA

I'm repeating myself because WTL is also repeating himself. Today it's not possible to replace the native apps with web apps since the web apps clearly can't do everything the native apps can do. In short the web apps can't be controlled that easily as the native apps, they can't access today the device features as the native apps can and they can't work on offline as well. At least not on iOS and that makes then to target less than 95-98% market share the native apps can reach.

This will change in the future but no one has been able to tell when this will change. WTL seems to think that it has already changed but this is clearly the case. He can't even tell us how the web apps can access text messages on both Android and iOS.

As long as no one can say when this will change it's better to do native apps since that already allows reaching 95-98% on the smartphones. This is a question not you or WTL has been able to answer. Just saying that it will change is worthless and has absolutely no value since the change will of course happen. What would have value would be knowing when will this happen. It has not yet happened. When will it happen? Can you answer that or do you keep repeating only that it will happen? That's known by everyone. When it will happen is not.

[nabeel]

Hello dear,
Apple & Black Berry when come on lunching so generate a new & big create home in smart phone & cell