Communities Dominate Brands

The Phonebook 2016 Edition is Released

Got it finished just before the year ended. The Phone Book 2016 is now shipping to those who pre-ordered it. I will do a blog about phone handset industry details and stats of course but now gotta get a bit of rest. The final Phone Book ended up as 183 pages long with 102 table and charts. For those who want to buy the best little book about all the stats numbers and facts for the handset industry and as always, costs just 10 Euros, get your TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 here. All data current as of December 2016.

Preview from TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 Edition: Internet Users Globally... by Screen Size

I'm working to finish the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 to meet its December 2016 release target (have 2 more days to do that..). I did however find a fabulous tribute by one of its many fans. It is from David Doherty, better known as 'The 3G Doctor' who is active also on Twitter as @mHealthInsight and is my personal guru in all areas relating to how the healthcare industry uses our mobile technology. David created this promotional image as a kind of Christmas present for me. (Thank you so much David!) 





It is a genuine item of pure fan creation. I didn't ask David to do this nor did I pay him to do it, and he did it without any expectation from me, but sent it to me, just as a thank you for loving my Almanac and Phone Book series for all these years. Thank YOU David. this is way better than the ugly cover of my Phone Book itself haha. So with that nice fan recognition, lets also share one new stat from the upcoming Phone Book 2016 (every edition has some new stats that were never seen before). So we'll do insights into .... internet users. Isn't THAT relevant for all of us?

According to the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016, there are now 3.4 Billion total internet users globally. Readers of this blog have known for years that the majority of the internet users are mobile of course. But about those DEVICES? About one in three of us uses two or more devices to access the internet, so for the wealthier among us, its normal to use both a smartphone and a PC or tablet or easily 3 or even 4 devices. So what is the TOTAL DEVICE population that accesses the internet then? It's far larger than 3.4B of course. I have that number for you: its 4.7 Billion devices (used by 3.4B humans). And now, the best piece for free: what is the SPLIT of PC & tablet 'large screen' internet devices in use globally, vs small screen (phablet, smartphone normal screen and tiny WAP screens). The split is 36% large PC/tablet size screen internet vs 64% small screen (mobile phone including phablet), when devices used are counted. There! Again data you don't find anywhere else. If you want the full split, how many are PC screens vs tablet screens vs smartphone screens vs WAP/tiny screens; or the split of mobile phone screen sizes in the installed base, ie phablet screens, normal smartphone screens, small smartphone screens and small non-touch screens - then you have to pay the 10 Euro and buy the Phone Book. Get the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 here (you can order it today, I'll send you both. You get the older 2014 edition now as you wait the few days till I finish the 2016 edition - so you get two ebooks for the price of one):

Dear Santa: What I'd Like for Christmas is for the Essence of Nokia to Return in 2017

Lets write a letter to Santa. Santa Claus lives in Finland (not on the North Pole but that is a common misconception, Finland is, after all, the Northernmost country in the world when countries are compared by the centers of their geography). Santa lives in a mountain called Korvatunturi (The Ear Mountain) which is in Lapland. Finnair is the official airline of Santa and Rovaniemi is the official airport for Santa. As Nokia is a Finnish company (from far far South, born in the town of Nokia from which the company took its name. Nokia the town is located outside of Tampere, inland in SouthWestern Finland; originally Nokia was a paper mill company and also a rubber goods manufacturer before it made telecoms equipment like mobile phones. Thats how I knew Nokia as a kid in Helsinki my rubber boots were Nokia brand and in our Saab car, we had Nokia brand tyres). I know there are always skeptics around this time of year, who make silly claims that Santa is not real, here is the proof. Rovaniemi is the official airport of Santa Claus! What more could you ask for?




So its appropriate to ask a Finnish miracle-maker like Santa Claus to help out a quintessentially Finnish consumer brand, Nokia as in mobile phone handsets. And for 2017 we are about to see the return of the brand that less than a decade ago was the most used consumer brand on the planet. More people used Nokia branded mobile phones than wore Levi's blue jeans, drove Toyota cars, told time on Timex wrist watches, watched a Sony TV, worked on a Windows PC, or drank Coca Cola or ate a Big Mac. Nokia was by the end of the last decade, literally, the most widely-spread consumer brand on the planet (and one of the most valuable brands too, more valuable than Mercedes Benz).

CONNECTING PEOPLE

Regular readers of this blog know how Nokia died. Yes, Nokia the company did not die, they survived their crisis, they sold their handset business to Microsoft and fired their idiot CEO and kept selling other telecoms networking equipment and are a giant global company, a profitable one, today. They compete with Ericsson, they recently purchased the Alcatel-Lucent telecoms business, thats how rich and powerful they are. Nokia had previously purchased/merged with several of its past telecoms infrastructure-maker rivals like Siemens and Motorola. So I am of course talking about the consumer brand, what most 'normal people' associate with the brand Nokia. Its handsets, its mobile phones, its cameraphones, its featurephones, its smartphones. From the Communciator to the N-Series, E-Series, the X-Series; to the Lumia and Asha; to magnificent masterpieces of technology marvels like the Pureview cameraphones. The brand whose slogan was 'Connecting People' and who literally achieved that. When Nokia introduced its first mobile phone, the whole world had less than 800 million telephones (almost all fixed landline phones at that time, and most of the rest were Motorola handsets). By the time Nokia reached its peak, there were more than 1.4 Billion human beings who walked around with a Nokia in their pockets.

However, consider HOW Nokia did it. Here is 'the Nokia Way' part of that growth. Consider first Apple? Apple's iPhones currently are used by 525 million people. Apple did not bring pocket computing to those 525 million people. At least 500 million of them had a computer before, most had a smartphone before they bought their first iPhone, and almost all of the rest had a more basic mobile phone before they bought their first iPhone. Apple does not bring technology to people, it makes existing technology BETTER. That is the Apple way. They take bad broken concepts like the DOS-era Personal Computer, and redesign it magnificently and give us the Macintosh, a computer run with a mouse and icons and beautiful graphics, and today every Windows PC owes its history to the Mac. The same with music and the iPod, the input of modern phones as touch-screen phones (the original iPhone of 2007 was not a smartphone and smartphones had existed for 10 years, Apple did not invent the smartphone nor even re-invent the smartphone; even app stores existed for years before Apple launched its App Store in 2008) and what Apple did to tablet computers with the iPad. Apple does not invent new tech, it adapts existing tech but does it so totally and perfectly and beautifully, it recreates whole industry sectors and of course Apple does this at enormous profits selling to rich people of the world. So how did Nokia do it, then?

Out of the 1.4 Billion humans who had a Nokia branded mobile phone in their pockets at the start of year 2011, 80% of those lived not in the rich world, 80% of those were living in.. the Emerging World. Living in India, China, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey etc. Of those 80% who owned a Nokia phone in 2012, most did not own a premium-priced Nokia N-Series or E-Series smartphone, most owned basic phones or mid-priced 'featurephones' but still proudly carried their most-prized possession. For most who owned a Nokia, for MOST, the Nokia brand was not just their first MOBILE phone brand, for most, their first Nokia phone was indeed their first-ever phone. Their home had NEVER had a wired telephone before they got connected via the Nokia brand. If you want to think about the corporate marketing slogan of 'Connecting People', no company has connected more people (ie people who never previously had any telecoms, digital, internet or banking/payments connection of any type before - no fixed landline, no internet connection, no credit card or bank account even) - that was Nokia.  If we take a modest number, and say only 80% of those in the Emerging World who at the end of year 2010 had a Nokia branded phone in their pockets, out of those if only 8 in 10 were of this class, that before their first Nokia phone, they never had a telephone, not as a fixed landline in their home, nor personally as a mobile phone, before their first Nokia sometime in that previous decade, then that number is a massive 912 million people.

EVERY STORY NEEDS AN iVILLAIN

Understand this point. When Nokia launched its first mobile phone, the world only had 800 million total telephones. It was not just that Nokia sold expensive premium mobile phones to those rich people of the Western Industrialized rich countries, who could afford a Motorola or Siemens or Ericsson or Panasonic or Nokia (or Palm or Blackberry or HTC or Apple smartphone) - yes, Nokia sold to hundreds and hundreds of millions of those types of customers, of course. They bought the premium Nokia phones. BUT IN ADDITION TO THEM, Nokia went out to literally 'Connecting People'. They connected MORE people who never were electronically reachable before, and connected more people to the telecoms and digital networks than had been the total connected human population before Nokia started. And those new connected people in India, China, Nigeria, Brazil, Egypt, Russia, Indonesia etc - they all found their first digital telecoms connections through a Nokia branded magical device in their pockets. Those phones by Nokia were durable, they had batteries that lasted forever, they had features the consumers greatly appreciated, they were compatible with the standards, they had connectivity that worked with everything. They were so indestructible, a dog ate one. The family took the dog to the doctor who x-rayed the dog and saw the phone inside the dog. The dog eventually pooped the Nokia phone out - and yes, it still worked (may have smelled a bit). One Nokia phone stopped a bullet and saved its owner. There was a video of someone using a Nokia phone as a hammer to hit in a nail into a wall - hitting with its SCREEN (don't try that on an iPhone).

Compare this to Apple. Apple wants to lock us into the iPrison. They want to only sell to rich people, very expensive iToys that lock their customers to proprietary iStandards of a very snobbish iParadise where Apple control everything. An iWeb woven by the possessive iSpider. The Apple pure way and nothing ever is compatible with all other standards, the Apple way always has its own weird connectors and they are always in a rush to abandon anything that would give compatiblity to the rest of the world from USB ports to the standard earphone jacks now that used to be part of the iPhone. All of this obssession with disconnectivity, is so Apple can sell you more at their proprietary standards. Yes, Apple is the second-bestselling mobile phone brand globally today behind only Samsung. But they are not anywhere near attempting to connect the world (at least Samsung is also doing that). Apple is strictly just milking the iSheep for all the profits they can - witness the silly idea of the Apple Watch. Selling an iDecoration for the wrist at obscene prices.

Lets turn to Nokia. Its not just they were Connecting People. What about our memories? The single most important memories for all families are their photographs. Global, planetary phenomenon. If your house is on fire and you've got your kids and dog out safely, the immediate next thought is - the photographs! For most people who own a camera today, for most that is a cameraphone, not a stand-alone digital camera. For most who own a cameraphone, their first-ever cameraphone was a Nokia. Think about that for a moment. Before the cameraphone, only rich people could afford cameras. But Nokia put cameras onto not just its expensive smartphones, Nokia put cameras onto its basic phones. For most people on the planet who have a camera today, their first owned camera brand was Nokia (as part of the phone they had). Whether they today are still a Nokia loyal user or have moved onto Samsung or Huawei or Apple or whatever, their first camera was a Nokia. Can you imagine the impact that 'phone' made on the life of that village in Africa, when the first Nokia cameraphones arrived and then the local wedding and birthdays and graduations started to be documented by cameras?

The Nokia Tune is the most recognized song on the planet. In terms of our Christmas theme, yes, the Gran Vals by Torrega (ie the Nokia Tune) is more recognized on the planet than the song White Christmas. Its more known than any song by Elvis or the Beatles or Michael Jackson or Madonna. It is known more than 'Happy Birthday'. It is the only 'Western' song widely recognized even in countries that severely restricted access of any 'Western corrupting' culture such as North Korea and Cuba. The game Snake that has been standard on Nokia phones for nearly two decades now, is the most-played videogame on the planet. Yes more have played Snake than Solitaire on a PC haha. And far more have played Snake than who have played Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Pokemon Go or Super Mario Brothers.

The Nokia that once was, that was a gentle giant. They did invent a lot of magical technology for us, such as the world's first smartphone (the Communicator, literally a decade before the iPhone). But in many ways, like Apple iPhone of today, the mythology then takes over. Many of the great aspects of the Nokia phones of the past were attributed as Nokia inventions while they were actually not. So take cameraphones. Nokia had the highest annual sales of cameras recorded in history of nearly 350 million cameraphones sold per year (Samsung has come close but not yet passed that level annually when their smartphones and dumbphones are added together). Many think Nokia invented the cameraphone. It didn't. Sharp of Japan invented the cameraphone in 2001. Same for music. Nokia was yes the first phone maker to put a 'song' as its ringing tone to its phones; and then again, the first phone maker to let YOU the consumer install your OWN songs (as very simple ringing tones) onto your phones to further personalize it (I created my first ringtone in October of 1998 haha, when did you first LEARN of the ability to install a ringing tone to your phone...) but 'musicphones' like the original iPhone of 2007 or the SonyWalkman phones that back then were killing the iPod business? They were not invented by Nokia. Musicphones - that had MP3 songs downloaded onto them and had MP3 players on them - they were invented in South Korea. Sony Music's artist Ricky Martin was the first to release MP3 songs to download onto the first musicphones in South Korea (I got to meet the executive who came up with that idea some years later, it was funny that I knew 'his story' haha). So while for most consumers who had pop music stored on their phones in year 2012, that was more often a Nokia phone than any other music player - Nokia did not invent musicphones.

Nokia was a kind of 'bellweather' company for most tech. Others would launch it first, experimentally. When Nokia decided to install that technology then it was time to do it mainstream. Like Nokia did with 3G or with 'selfie' cameras (early Nokia cameraphones only had the 'outward-facing' camera, not the inward-facing videophoning camera we now call the selfie camera). So once Nokia decided to put 3G into its phones in large scale, then the whole industry knew, hey, this will be everywhere we have to do this too. And MP3 players, cameras, Bluetooth, etc. Today Apple's iPhone seems to be that way a lot. No matter what Samsung does, it doesn't seem to matter until Apple does it. Is waterproofing really necessary? When Samsung did it, nobody cared, but when Apple does it, wow this is awesome. When Samsung did its Note sized phablets, nah, you don't need a big screen but when suddenly Apple does the iPhone 6 Plus, wow, the big screen is awesome, etc. We seem to have the iPhone today acting for the industry in that 'what is ripe' bellweather, what Nokia used to be for the industry before.

Unfortunately here is where the old Nokia philosophies of Espoo and the iTax people thinking of Cupertino are at odds quite dramatically. Whatever Apple tends to do, is strip the industry out of its commonality, its functionality, and give only iProprietary and expensive cumbersome solutions. Apple is notorious for this. They didn't bother to give MMS functionality to their first iPhone. And industry telecoms standard? Your airline sends you a boarding pass, oh, sorry, is that an iPhone you use? We can't send it. Sorry. No, of course this is silly. Apple was forced to put the MMS standard into all iPhones in less than a year. But that is Apple's way of thinking. Look at the silly one-button mouse on the Mac. How many decades have Mac users begged for two buttons on the Mac like the incredible functionality that the second mouse gives those who use the far-more-widely-used Windows PCs? But no. Its the Apple way, we know better and style is always more important than functionality at Apple and less is always better. Always take control away from the end user, and from the ecosystem too. Look at Apple's repeated feuds with the telco industry trying to take away the SIM card, to create the virtual SIM card.

THE NOKIA WAY

Now compare to Nokia. Look at WiFi. Nokia did not invent the WiFi phone (Invented in Japan by NTT DoCoMo). But Nokia was the first-non-Japanese phone maker to put WiFi onto its smartphones. And what did American carriers demand? They demanded that Nokia cripple its smartphones and take WiFi away (so carriers can screw their customers by forcing them to use the more expensive cellular data networks which also often in the USA are notoriously unreliable). Nokia said no. And Nokia insisted, this is an international telecoms standard. It is also the standard specs of the same handset model we sell around the world, we will not CRIPPLE the phone for the US market and take out functionality. That is against the user experience. And yes, obviously WiFi won. But you know what? Nokia was also winning that war. The rest of the world went along with Nokia and increasingly all major smartphone makers also put WiFi onto their phones but the US carriers blocked Nokia premium phones from their markets for years. But that dam was broken in late 2010 and for February 2011, Nokia had already announced its return to the US market with its first top-end smartphone provided with handset subsidy by one of the major carriers - only to have this deal suddenly cancelled by Nokia (because the lunatic CEO had suddenly decided to destroy his company, as we later found out). But if you ever used WiFi on your phone today, in any hotspot in the world, don't thank Apple. Don't thank Samsung. It was a war that was fought - bitterly paid for, with considerable market share penalties, but ultimately won - by Nokia. A war won for us, by Nokia. Nokia did not invent the WiFi phone but they won that war for us. Meanwhile Apple? They cripple the functionality on their phones all the time. Bluetooth was crippled, FM radio was muted and off, the video functionality of early Apple cameras was turned off, etc. They are control freaks who want to limit you and limit THE INDUSTRY.

Nokia wanted the industry to thrive. So they put memory card functionality onto their phones! Not expensive internal memory that you have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the phone models with enough memory. No, put in a memory slot and now the consumer can buy the amount of storage you want - AND you can buy more later (when memory prices are lower) AND you can upgrade that ability later, and you have a convenient way to exchange information with friends ('Connecting People') and most of all - when you replace your phone, you can take your memory card and slot it into the next phone and instantly have all your precious memories on that phone. Has anyone EVER begged Apple to put a microSD slot onto the iPhone? Did essentially all rival phone makers offer microSD by the time Apple came along? And has Apple bothered? No. Of course not because of iTyranny. And here we see the CORROSIVE side of how Apple does it. After Apple doesn't offer microSD, now other makers are removing microSD support as well. Samsung tried this with the Galaxy and got burned and brought the microSD back, but that is what Apple causes. When Apple leads, others follow and in many ways (removable batteries for example) once Apple sets the stage - WE the CONSUMERS suffer when OTHER makers follow Apple's lead. With Nokia it was the opposite way! We gained when Nokia led the way even if we ended up buying another phone by some other brand at a later date.

But did you see HMD's first announced ultra-cheap cameraphone just introduced last week? Not the first proper Android smartphone by the returning Nokia brand. It takes more time to design the top-end phones, but its faster to do the cheap phones. HMD announced its first pair of ultra-cheap Nokia basic phones. The price of unsubsidised (aka SIM-free aka no contract) phones is an amazing 26 US dollars only - no smartphone, no web browser, no downloadable apps, no Facebook. BUT it is a color screen CAMERAphone at that price, with a Nokia brand! The camera even has LED flash. And at this bottom-end price phone, the new Nokia has yes.. a microSD slot. Thank you Nokia, thank you HMD, you are showing us that you are true to the essence of what was best in the old Nokia we used to love so much.

And FM radio? Yes. FM radio. The chips that the iPhone uses, come with FM radio capability built in nowadays. And Apple rather than give us free music of the universal standard of FM radio, of course in their iDictator mindset crippled the FM radio functionality so the iPhone user - who tends to LISTEN TO MUSIC and have good earphones - cannot listen to FM radio! This is all to maximize the profits of the iTaxman - they would rather you are forced to spend money in the iTunes store buying paid music than like an evil pirate, listen to free despicable FM radio.... (the chip HAS the functionality but Apple iSadists will cripple the functionality so you can't have it). Nokia put FM radios to all its musicphones the moment the technology became possible. The exact opposite way. For most people in Africa, the first FM radio their family ever owned and the family was able to listen to - was on a Nokia basic phone, the FM functionality that came with the basic phone. They then used the 'loudspeaker mode' ie the 'speakerphone' mode (another Nokia invention that everybody laughed at but now every phone has). This is the very core of the Nokia Way. This is 'Connecting People'. And it is the philosophy of harmony with the standards in the world, with open technologies that build, not closed proprietary and expensive systems to shield and lock into a private exclusive garden.

OUR PRIDE AND JOY

Nokia was not a perfect company but boy, as a Finn, was I proud of our biggest corporation and what it represented. It won awards as the most 'green' company of the handset makers, and even as it gave us wonderful tech at the top-end of the technology spectrum (Nokia had an app store before Apple, had a 4 inch screen size before the iPhone, had a phablet before the iPhone, had NFC before the iPhone, had DVD quality video recording before the iPhone, gosh, the joke was, to see what will come in the next iPhone, look at a 3 year old Nokia) what made me personally most proud of, in Nokia was that it was truly 'Connecting People' in the Emerging World, who had never been digitally connected before. Their first phone, their first music player, their first internet browser, their first camera, their first FM radio, their first payment instrument, their first video camera - was a Nokia phone. Nokia was the most valuable brand throughout vast areas of the Emerging World. Not the most valuable PHONE brand or tech brand. The. Most. Valuable. Brand. Period. More valuable than IBM or Coca Cola or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Apple. Nokia, the most valuable brand in the country, from India to Nigeria to Brazil. And then when I showed my Nokia business card back in the day, gosh they were impressed. Later, when I said I have written 12 books, that did not impress my audiences as much as telling them I used to work for Nokia at its headquarters. As I have often said, if you cut me, my blood is not red, I bleed Nokia blue.

So the past six years were a nightmare for me personally and we've lived through that trauma on this blog as I chronicled all the blunders of the worst CEO in history who demolished my most beloved brand. And we saw the sad aftermath of where the Nokia handset brand then ended at Microsoft and its failure there too. But it is nearly Christmas and this is a magical time. Lets wish upon a star. Lets ask Santa Claus for some good will to all men and the safe successful return of Nokia brand to many millions possibly again one day, billions of pockets.

I was literally the first person to say, the Microsoft Windows alliance would doom Nokia's handset business. It was a catastrophic mistake. It would end in Nokia having to sell its handset business. I said so not just ON THE DAY it was announced, I said it within MINUTES of the news breaking. I said it on Twitter and came on this blog and wrote my prophesy about it. Not just that Nokia would fail, it would ruin the handset business, not only ruin what was then only HALF of Nokia's handset business, its smartphone business - but this would doom all of Nokia's handset business including its dumbphone side. I was the first to predict Microsoft would have to buy the doomed handset operation. I said the Nokia CEO would be fired for this Windows decision. I said even after Microsoft would buy the Nokia handset business, it could not make it work - and in less than 3 years after Microsoft would buy the Nokia handset business, that business would either be shut down or sold (as it was then obviously sold, in less than 3 years from when Microsoft took over). Nobody else made that series of forecasts. NOBODY else made all those calls. I had every one of them correctly. I did not ever call for a Nokia collapse prior to that date so I was not a Nokia-hater. I had never said Windows smartphone OS was doomed prior to 2011, even as I am an openly-admitted Microsoft-hater and have been for three decades. Prior to year 2011, I have never said Windows smartphones were doomed. Its not like someone who every year says something and one year he is finally right. I never said those before, but I was the first to call it, and on every one of those Nokia related forecasts, I was not just the first to call it, I was correct 100% of the time. I did not make ONE BAD call of something I said would happen, that did NOT happen, either. If you read this blog from 2010 to today and only read the articles that mentioned 'Nokia' in its title, you knew PERFECTLY what was going to happen to Nokia (and its partner Microsoft in smartphones) for the past 6 years, correctly foretelling EVERY stage including the repeated layoffs, including WHEN the company was going to generate losses, including how badly the market share was going to collapse etc. Nobody else comes anywhere near close.

And in 2013. In September 2013 when we learned with a very heavy heart, that yes, Nokia's handset business was going to be sold (to Microsoft) that was when I wrote on this blog:

"We will miss you Nokia as a consumer brand. Please fare well as the networks provider and if the gods of technology have any sense of justice, they will let our Nokia return one day to again live with us, in our pockets ...and in our hearts."

The gods of technology have smiled upon us and shown us mercy, they are letting Nokia return to our pockets. I would later prophesize further that 'poetic justice' would be for Microsoft not to shut down its disastrously unprofitable and horrendously unsuccessful Nokia handset unit, but rather to 'sell it back' to Nokia. There was some speculation that Microsoft might sell its Nokia business to some other tech company. I thought the best idea would be to 'sell it back' to Nokia. And while HMD is not Nokia, HMD is a start-up based in Finland, staffed by ex Nokia senior execs, its nearly that 'Hollywood ending' that I had dreamed of. The Nokia handset brand, for what is tarnished remains left of it, is kind of returning home, or close to home, to Finland. And Nokia the actual corporation (telecoms infrastructure giant) still will benefit out of some licencing deals with the brand if this HMD entity can make this Nokia brand return actually work out, commercially in the coming years.

So I write to you, Santa Claus. Please give us technology fans and of course your most humble local servants, the Finns who endure those miserably cold bitter snowy Finnish winters with you and work in your sheds, a Christmas Gift. Let the HMD venture with Foxconn succeed and let this new returning Nokia brand have the very essence of the Nokia that the world grew to love, as the world itself became more connected. Let those people who will experience a Nokia brand in 2017 and beyond, cherish it as deeply as they did their first Nokias a decade or even two before.

A LOYAL CUSTOMER BASE

So lets look a bit about HMD's mission and its particular challenges. First the dumbphones side. I mean the Microsoft handset business that was not smartphones (Nokia featurephones that included the Asha type 'nearly smartphones' and ultra-cheap basic phones) was in a death-spiral. It had no synergy to Microsoft's future, the devices too low cost to even be possible to run the bloated Windows OS so these customers were not relevant to Microsoft's visions of its future. The dumbphone-side handset unit was occasionally profitable even under Elop at Nokia (while the smartphone side, Lumia Windows smartphones never once delivered even one quarter of a profit) but when Microsoft had to cut costs out of its failing hardware business, those cuts of course came deeply in this undesirable part of the Nokia acquisition. From HMD's side, there is a huge upside but also an urgent need. Nearly 10% of all humans who have any type of mobile phone in their pockets today, still has a Nokia branded phone! When they walk into that phone store in the next 30 months, they will ask to see a new Nokia, even if they have become 'sold' on perhaps switching brands by say local advertising, they are existing loyal happy Nokia users, and they will at least want to see what the latest Nokia looks like (within their price range).

This is an ENORMOUS opportunity. That is 195 million customers who walk into a phone store worldwide, in year 2017. For context, remember Apple will sell about 220 million iPhones this year. Now by far MOST of those 195 million Nokia owners who will replace or upgrade their phone next year, will not be smartphone users (only about 1 in 7 will have a smartphone, 6 in 7 will have a dumbphone of the Nokia brand) BUT for about a third of them, this is when they take their step into buying their first-ever smartphone. And for nearly all who remain, the two thirds who now own a dumbphone and will replace it with another very-low-cost dumbphone again, for them, they do not know it, but it will very likely be the last dumbphone they ever bought because their NEXT phone will be a smartphone. Their NEXT upgrade/replacement happens around year 2019 or 2020 when 95% of all phones sold will be .. (ultra-low cost basic Android) smartphones.

Nokia used to have the best loyalty in the handset business. Even in its decline stage, in the EMERGING WORLD markets, Nokia continued to have high, and often yes, best loyalty. Those 195 million who walk into a handset store next year to replace an old well-worn Nokia phone, will be delighted if a new Nokia fits their budget and roughly their expectations of functionality and features.

I am not in any way suggesting that HMD and Foxconn can convert that 195 million user potential into anywhere near 195 million sales but they might get half. And then if its roughly say 100 million handsets, you do see, thats already nearly HALF the SCALE of the global shipments of iPhones (also made by Foxconn/Hon Hai). So there is the first giant opportunity and a considerable strategy and management challenge - how to grab as many of those potential Nokia buyers, and feed them 'something' nearly anything, to just hold onto them. To do that somewhat profitably, and get the HMD-Foxconn alliance up on its feet and up to scale. That scale means sourcing parts, it means staffing sales, it means bulk shipment discounts at air cargo, it means preferred placement in in-store sales.

Here is the HUGE upside to that prospect. Almost every dumbphone (in the Emerging World) is sold through the IDENTICAL sales channel as the smartphone in that country. It its a carrier-sales model, the carrier stores decide. If its a retail distribution model, then the handset retailers stock both smartphones and dumbphones. Then if you have roughly 5% of the handset market (even as most of it is ultra-low-cost handsts) you DO HAVE SHELF SPACE in EVERY STORE. A rival who sells 2% or 1% may not be in every store. Samsung will sell 25% and will be in every store. Apple is so expensive you'd have to be a fool not to include iPhones in your store. But Sony will not be in every store. HTC will not be in every store. LG will not be in every store. Only Nokia will be the one other brand, in year 2017, in most Emerging World markets, where the Nokia brand will be in essentially every retail outlet for handsets.

Here HMD needs a smart strategy to deliver 'just profitable enough' models that are truly 'priced to fly off the shelves' at the lower and mid-price levels, to lock as many of those customers as possible. To make the business itself sustainable, to stop the decline in total sales and market share that has gone on for six years. And to try not to damage the Nokia brand itself in doing that (not cut corners, bad products, exploding batteries, antennagate, bendygate, alarm clocks that don't wake you up, you know, the usual problems in handsets). But that will not excite the market or get any leadership credits. So HMD should (or could) also do a few selected 'flagship' class products - ideally several launched at various points in the year, say one in February for Barcelona, a second one for the summer and a third for Christmas 2017 season. Use those flagships to help grab the headlines, tell the story of the amazing comeback. Showcase some tech leadership and help sustain the image that Nokia stands for premium quality and performance. THOSE premium phones do not need to sell in large numbers and they can end up being prices quite high (to maintain profitability) but I would expect more than one flagship class phone out during 2017 to just remind Nokia owners that their brand is one of the leaders and has nothing to be ashamed of, when compared to a Galaxy or iPhone.

Here we have seen rumors and some leaked photos of some products in the mid-price range of the first Android smartphones. Starting in the 150 dollar range, mid-spec performance and features but what seems to be a very 'logical' mid-field product offering by specs. Ticks every box, has every common feature you'd expect in roughly the right range of specs. You can probably find an Android smartphone of almost the same specs for say 100 dollars from a 'nobody brand' but probably no Samsung or rival in the 150 dollar price will in any way significantly beat the Nokia. This would be the intended big seller to reverse the sale collapse of Nokia smartphones and get the Nokia smartphone market share back into growth and hoping to get back into the Top 10 by say year 2018. It will not be a phone you or I would want for ourselves but it might be a good value phone to buy as a gift for a teenager for example. And this phone will be aimed to sell for the middle class adults in the Emerging World who would love an iPhone but know its beyond their budget. 150 dollars is a bit below the global average price of all phones. Its about half the average price of all phones. Its nicely near the sweet spot in terms of volume sales (remember difference between average and median). If we look at median prices of smartphones in the Emerging World, 150 dollars is very close to exactly that. This is not a flagship. This is a class of smartphone intended to sell in large quantities to the masses. Good plan. Now what about a possible flagship then?

THE X FACTOR

So then this week we had the story out of China of a possible first flagship. Its just a rumor, we don't know, but the pictures seemed to suggest dual camera (like the iPhone, so one wide angle camera and one telephoto camera) and LED flash and .... also Xenon flash. I think most who looked at the specs of the Chinese story went with the parts about the CPU and screen specs etc but the real story is the one with the X. Xenon. That picture is clearly a Xenon flash unit. If the picture is accurate that the flagship has 2 cameras, and both an LED flash and Xenon flash, that would be very ... telling news about the philosophy we could see on the flagship class phones. Ever since Nokia entered cameraphones, it ran away with the best-cameraphone-of-the-year awards, ranging from the breathtaking N93 (first ever phone with 3mp camera, AND optical zoom, ie real zoom not pixel nonsense of digital zoom we all have but proper professional camera-style optical zoom made with glass, and DVD quality video recording etc); to the N5, the N82, the N86, and the N8, each miles ahead of the competition in terms of their cameras; culminating with Pureview. The technology that just blew any comparisons away and singlehandedly ended the megapixel race. (For those readers who aren't aware of this, the Nokia 808 Pureview smartphone had a camera sensor with 41 megapixels. That is not a misprint. Rival cameras at the time had typically 8mp. Nokia put 41mp into its phone? Even professional cameras do 24mp or 32mp and almost no top smartphones today do more than 20mp but back in 2012, Nokia gave a cameraphone with a sensor of 41 megapixels. At that time the only cameras with bigger sensors were on US spy satellites up in space. Literally, no Nikon or Canon professional camera costing 7,000 dollars just for the body alone, had that many pixels ie could get that much detail out of a picture). The 808 Pureview and its sister phone later on Windows, Lumia 1020, utterly devastated the expectations of camera quality in terms of their sensor pixel count (and various other tech too). Only after the lunatic CEO decision, did Nokia's leadership in cameras end and as I wrote on this blog, the ultimate cameraphone ever made is as of today still, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom (from 2 years ago, sadly Samsung seems to have decided not to update this pocket miracle, in their cost-cutting frenzy). if you want to read the definitive internet article about cameraphones, my epic blog is here.

Lets get back to the X-factor. What is Xenon flash and why do we care. It means the 'real' flash you have in any professional flashgun the wedding photographer uses. It is what is on your Nikon or Olympus or Canon camera. It is not the type of 'flash' what you have on your iPhone or almost any cameraphone. We have what is called 'LED flash' in almost all smartphones. Xenon is 'real' flash for cameras. LED flash is generated by powerful LED lights that are turned on for about 1/10th of a second. Xenon flash is brilliant light tube that has to be charged before it can deliver its flash, which lasts less than 1/10,000th of a second and can be as short as 1/100,000th of a second. Xenon creates that brilliantly white light, reaches far further, and only Xenon flash can stop motion (LED flash pictures often have blur, while Xenon is always sharp). But Xenon as such, is not our point. Yes, I'm an ex semi-pro photographer and I know the difference and I love my Xenon on my cameraphones but this is not about flash photography. This is about the GUTS of that Nokia flagship.

You cannot put a Xenon flash onto the iPhone. There is a technical reason to it. But Nokia had a Xenon flash on its top cameraphones as far back as year 2008. That is the story that I think most analysts missed about that picture leaked from China. Xenon does not mean just that Nokia might have an expensive excellent flash unit installed onto its flagship for great inside pictures at night. It means something else. It means the camera HAS to have a physical mechanical shutter. Not a cheap electronic shutter like almost all cameraphones (including nearly all Nokias). Only a mechanical shutter will allow a Xenon flash unit to function (on current tech, at least). This is an expensive additional gadget that is not necessary when taking basic camera functionality into a phone (simple camera, like on an iPhone) but it IS needed if you do a proper serious camera (like any top Nokia cameraphone, or ANY Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Minolta, Sony etc DSLR or pocket camera, including ALL those cameras that used film before).

If the first Nokia flagship indeed comes with Xenon flash (and I hope it does) that means one thing. It means the cameraphone will have a mechanical shutter. And you my dear reader are going 'who cares?'. Yeah. Who cares? It means that the CAMERA part of the flagship has been done with the utter love and care of Nokia's best attention to always creating the best camera possible onto a phone. Not cheap plastic like an iPhone with a puny small Sony sensor inside. But literally the best technology that is possible, to fit inside a phone. I would love for the first Nokia flagship to have Pureview technology. I do not expect it to have that (yet). I would love the first Nokia flagship to beat every existing cameraphone by every spec, but I do not expect that to happen. What I will be utterly happy with, is if we get the 'essence of Nokia' in the first camera of Nokia's first return era flagship. The first Nokia flagship that was manufactured by Foxconn. The first designed by HMD? I would truly be delighted it it has Xenon flash, not because Xenon is better than LED (which it is, for still photography but note, Xenon cannot be used in video, which is why it ALSO has LED light for video). It would mean the new Nokia flagship has proper camera 'guts' inside, it has a mechanical shutter. It is designed to be a proper camera.

The camerawars have quieted down a lot in the smartphone space since the first Pureview put an end to the megapixel race. There is the occasional optical zoom. Apple has now done the dual camera idea with a separate wide angle and separate telephoto lens idea (less elegant than optical zoom but far better than nothing or haha, digital zoom). It seems like Nokia will do the dual camera type telephoto lens too (good, I'd love that, it would be more than I expected in the first flagship). But if Nokia has Xenon flash and a real shutter, it means HMD is SERIOUS about serving those loyal Nokia owners who loved Nokia for its CAMERAS. How big is that segment? Is it 2% or 5% or 10% or 25% of smartphone owners who would rank the camera feature the most important? If the returning Nokia brand can properly capitalize on a premium camera, and now running on Android as the OS, then Nokia could find a nice profitable niche at the top end and win a bunch of awards, and this could be a reason any store in any country in the world, would like to feature the new Nokia flagship and its sales staff eagerly try to sell it to the random Galaxy owner coming in for their next new Android based smartphone.

In 2012, a Nokia survey of its own return customers found that the camera was the top tech that their customers wanted. A 2015 Zogby study of US youth found that the camera was deemed 'crucial' by 96% of the youth! There is definitely a market segment that could be served by good camera-optimized smartphones but how big that segment is, that is not now known, because the camera side of the industry has fallen asleep. There may be a big sleeping giant there, or it may be just a small niche. We will not know until someone really tries it and it does seem by these rumors, that HMD is willing to explore that opportunity. It could be a big key to a strong return by the brand.

The first flagship will not be the ultimate that HMD and Foxconn can build. It will be needed to initially explore this part of what once was a Nokia stronghold. If a valuable market is discovered there, then the NEXT version, for about year 2018, now THAT could be a monster cameraphone, that could be the next Pureview (perhaps a 909 Pureview haha). But right now, Dear Santa, please let us get our old Nokia back, the one that gave great tech at reasonable prices, that was open and lived in all standards, that was user-friendly and did not cripple or damage its tech abilities. Let the HMD-Foxconn alliance make this partnership work and let the world start to be Connecting People again. A lot of people around the world do love 'that' Nokia even after all the Microsoft years and a comeback would be nice to see. And for the industry, to see a company built on Nokia philosophy, showing the gentler kinder cooperative way, rather than Apple's iTax iRule iSheep way; that too would be a breath of fresh air. After all, Android is Linux. And Linus Torvalds - the father of Linux, well he also came from the land of Santa Claus, yes Linus is a Finn too. So a Nokia phone running on Android ie on Linux is far more 'Finnish' than a Lumia running on Windows ever could hope to be.

For those who would like to understand 'everything' about the camera part of a mobile phone, including mechanical shutters, Xenon flashes, sensor sizes (not just megapixel counts) and things such as optical zooms, lens construction and depth-of-view etc, this is the definitive article on the camera side of mobile. Still utterly unmatched by any other article on the internet. Enjoy.

For those who would like a longer stroll down Nokia's memory lane, here is my love letter to Nokia, when the news came that the handset business was about to be sold to Microsoft.

And on more practical matters, if you need the numbers and stats of the mobile handset industry today, what sizes of screens they have or how many are smartphones or who has 3G or WiFi or bluetooth etc, all the stats you could hope for are in the TomiAhonen Phone Book statistical volume 200 pages, 100 stats, comes out every two years for Christmas. I am about to finish this year's edition so if you buy the 2014 edition now, you get both for the price of one. You get the older version immediately and also will be the first to receive the 2016 edition when I release it in some days from now. See table of contents and ordering info here.

Lastly for those who need to see the future of mobile, as seen by the most accurate forecaster of the mobile industry, my latest forecast came out last year, it gives industry forecasts to year 2018, and why would you even consider anyone else's forecast than mine haha. My forecast is here.  

TCL Continues its World Domination Plan, now adds Blackberry to its Brands (to Alcatel and Palm)

The Smartphone Bloodbath still continues its consolidation. Blackberry has just ended its run as a handset maker. They've signed their hardware rights to TCL of China. It covers all countries except India and a few neighbors like Bangladesh, where Blackberry had already sold those rights to local suppliers. And TCL, we know the brand as 'Alcatel' but the company is TCL and a couple of years ago they became the proud latest owner of Palm via HP. And now they become the manufacturers and distributors of Blackberry branded smartphones too. Congrats TCL and sad end to what once was called RIM Research in Motion and its Blackberry, who once were the second-bestselling smartphone brand on the planet, and now have abandoned the hardware space where Apple makes obscene profits but Blackberry kept losing customers every cycle and going deeper and deeper into the red. As I suggested, Blackberry was clearly yet another example of how handset makers die, in my theory of 'The Cliff'. And yes, Blackberry continues as a service brand and they will get royalties from TCL for the brand sales in phones.

How To Lie With Graphics: Different Graphics from the Same Data to tell Smartphone Migration Story

I'm nearly done with the 2016 edition to my mobile handset industry volume that comes out every two years, the TomiAhonen Phone Book. And I was doing an update to one of the graphics and played around with some different ways to tell the same story. Please note, that all these graphics related to the same data set, I am not talking about current market share sales (that is the easy number you can get most anywhere). This is the far harder number to find, the actual installed base of phones in use, accounting for the different ages of phones still being used, and in many countries the strong resale market where old Nokias, iPhones and Galaxies go to find a second or third pocket to live in. This is the type of data my Phone Book is full of, data you always wanted but can't find in most public sources. All these graphics on this blog posting related to one data set, and all of it is not current sales of smartphones vs dumbphones ('featurephones') but rather, it is the full global installed base of handsets, smart or dumb.

In absolute numbers, I project the year ends with 5.8 Billion handsets in use, 2.95B of those will be smartphones, 2,85B will be dumbphones. As we know, in the third quarter of this year, we passed the 50/50 point in the migration of all phones in use on the planet being smartphones (in new sales smartphones have outsold dumbphones now for a few years already). So I will be showing a graphic in the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 that tells this story. And like many of the graphs in the two statistical volumes that I publish, the annual Almanac and every-two-years-out Phone Book, the story is best told in a time-series so you see the trends that are currently going on. I typically have about 10 year or 12 year periods I tend to show. So lets do a bit of story-telling or 'lying with graphics' to illustrate what will be learned, if we pick one method or another in telling the story. So why trend-line? Why not just pie graph? I could show the statistic like this:



Source: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 (adapted graphic)
This graphic may be freely shared


That is honestly true on the numbers I report. This is the split of the world's mobile handset installed base, by type. 51% are smartphones, 49% are dumbphones at December 2016. And there is definitely value in that info but it does not show the time-series. Instead of pie graph, now lets do time series. This is how the same data has shown in the TomiAhonen Almanac series for a decade (note the colors are different) but those who have read the Almanac know this graphic well.



Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2016 (updated graphic, TomiAhonen Consulting December 2016)
This graphic may be freely shared

And now we can see the changes over time, as well as the current moment. Let me convert that graphic to the same colors I use in the Phone Book series (in the Almanac we have many more areas to cover, so the the total handset side only gets one chapter in the Almanac, and back in the previous decade when I launched the Almanac, the smartphone business was a quiet corner of the mobile industry haha. I have kept the colors then consistent over time so my readers can see the familiar items with familiar colors when they get the newer edition of the Almanac). So this is the same graphic for this blog now, as the one used in the Almanac for the past years, but converted to the colors I use for dumbphone vs smartphone race, in the TomiAhonen Phone Book series. Light blue are dumbphones, bright red are smartphones.



Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2016 and TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 (updated graphic, TomiAhonen Consulting December 2016)
This graphic may be freely shared

This is a fair representation of what has happened and this is how I have illustrated the race for years in the Almanac (and also in the Phone Book in the past). There is a shortcoming to this illustration and a misleading side to it. The shortcoming is, that we do not see the changes in the overall market. It seems like the market for phones overall has been stable. The misleading part is the optical illusion. Because most of the graphic has the blue part far larger than the red part, our brain is deceived into thinking even at the right end the blue part is larger. We have to 'think' to get to notice, that actually, red and blue are the same by the end. This version of showing the race, does not draw attention to how much significant the red part is currently, rather it draws our attention to how big the blue part was in the past. Let me convert that same picture to one that is not 'market share' balanced to even 100% every year, but rather, a graphic of absolute numbers that allows the growth (and/or decline) in the numbers annually. Now the same numbers over the same period of time give us this picture:

Source: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 (alternate graphic, TomiAhonen Consulting December 2016)
This graphic may be freely shared

This is a far more revealing picture to tell us about the whole handset industry, and the scale of smartphones in it, how long the fight has taken place and at what pace the smartphone has taken share from the dumbphone. The loss vs the previous graphic is that we now do not see the percentage annually, of the shift from dumbphones to smartphones. But now the optical illusion is diminished, and the 'threat' of the red part is far more pronounced. What this graphic does well, is illustrate how the growth of smartphones has done over time but it does not draw attention to how much dumbphone sales have fallen. An alternate positioning of the same data, tells us that. This switches the positions, putting dumbphones on the bottom and smartphones on the top. Same data again of course:



Source: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 (alternate graphic, TomiAhonen Consulting December 2016)
This graphic may be freely shared

See how now we are clearly drawn to the 'alarming' peak and fall of dumbphone sales that was quite 'invisible' in the previous graphs! Its the same data series. If you wanted to talk to a dumbphone maker (or its suppliers or retailers or accessories makers etc) this is the way to scare them, using the same data. Its not just that you are in decline, you lost the race (already). That is clear from this data. It was not obvious in the above data while the trend was yes, clear before.

All of those are valid ways to illustrate the race. I think there are two better ways, depending on perhaps what is the message you would like to communicate. If you want just a fair analysis 'unbiased' type of view, of the time series and the overall market, if we use staggered pillar graphs with absolute numbers (vs percentages), we can eliminate most of the optical illusion of the early problem and get to a relatively fair representation in one graphic. It includes the story of the growth of the overall size of the handset installed base. I like this view myself and will include this in the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 edition:




Source: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016
This graphic may be freely shared

The beauty of this type of graphic for this particular data set, is that it lets us focus on the last pillar set on the right, and we get more accurately the immediate observation, that roughly speaking blue and red are about the same size today. But it also shows the overall handset installed base growth over time, and the rate by which smartphones now are taking over. But there is another way to look at the same data, as not the total market but as a cannibalization of one phone type taking over from the older phone type. So again, its the same data, but here we can put the pillar graphs next to each other, by year. Now we see the decline of dumbphones from its peak installed base, and the growth of smartphones but we lose the overall handset market size data, that we had in the previous graphic.  



Source: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016
This graphic may be freely shared


If this was say VCR vs DVD player graphic it would probably be the better illustration for the race; but any smartphone has the utility of the full dumbphone (a DVD player cannot play our old Disney VHS tapes for the latest child). So this chart does give a misleading conclusion on the total size, where a reader could be thinking there were a TOTAL of 3.8 Blilion handsets in use at its peak (when they were dumbphones) not instantly understanding that these two sets should be added together and the total market is 5.8B today, and still growing. It is a more dramatic slide but it loses a key point of the total market growth, which is why I would not show this slide alone, without the previous slide shown first. As to the Phone Book, I will be including these two last graphs together in the new TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 edition, to illustrate the migration of dumbphones to smartphones. I will be placing these two graphics right next to each other so the reader can compare the two and of course will be making the point that it is the same data set, telling us the same story but focusing on different aspects of it.

With that rare adventure into graphics on this mostly text-based CDB blog, I now return to working feverishly to finish the 2016 edition of the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016 so we can get it out soon. If you want to order yours now, you know I do this special deal, where if you buy the current edition (2014 edition) now in days before the new edition comes out, you will get both. Its a ridiculously cheap resource costing only 10 Euros and having every number you ever hoped for about the industry, from screen sizes to camera resolutions to tech specs from NFC capability to WiFi, to installed bases of operating systems to regional splits of market leader brands etc etc etc. To see more about the current edition, go here to TomiAhonen Phone Book information and ordering page. 

Election Follow-Up: Final Count: Hillary won popular vote by 2%, Lost election obviously. Few observations

I want to write this mostly for my readers. We have a still-lively discussion going on in my 'last' (aka 'final') election-related blog. I don't want to have those readers constantly have to scroll through over 20 pages of old comments to see the latest comments added. So lets do an update for that story so those who are still discussing the US election. So they can have an easier place to meet up and chat about it, after all, I did start up that discussion topic for readers of this blog.

So lets do quick election follow-up. We have now almost all the counting done. The final turnout was about 135 million votes (turnout ended up being actually an increase of about 3% from 2012). Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote as most know, she got 2% more of the vote than Trump but her voters were concentrated in many states that were reliably Democratic like California, so because of the 'Electoral College' system it is Trump who wins the Presidency. And nobody is disuputing this aspect of the US system, although some are suggesting it may be time to move onto a popular vote, its the 5th time in history that the person who got more popular votes did not become the US President (the last time it happened was Al Gore vs George W Bush in year 2000).

When the consensus polling said its a 4% race with Hillary ahead, and all but one of the polls in the final weekend said Hillary Clinton would win the popular vote and she ended with 2% more popular votes, then the polling was actually fairly close. (What I made, myself, was a colossal mistake in assuming she'd then be able to turn that slight gain into a far bigger landslide win; but as I already wrote, I got it wrong and I thought there would be a big women's vote 'wave' that would propel a landslide election for her. Obviously instead of more women showing up than in normal elections, Hillary actually achieved a REDUCTION in the ratio of women vs men voting; so the wave went the opposite way to how I expected).

A few interesting observations. Trump ends up with 46% of the total vote (Romney lost 2012 with 47% of the vote) but Trump got more votes than Romney (because of a higher turnout). Trump can very fairly be said to have energized some voters, a few million in the final count, that did not come out for Romney but were energized to vote for Trump. He deserves credit for that (even if I personally don't agree with his political methods, they clearly worked for him). Note also that Trump has achieved the highest vote total of any US candidate for President by the Republican party in its history, in absolute terms. Trump got more votes than any Republican in the past, more than Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W Bush (Bush 2) in either of his elections; or older Republicans like Daddy Bush, and yes even more votes than Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon who both won in landslides. it Is because the overall electorate has grown. Obviously Trump has not been anywhere near the record in Republican voter percentage as even Romney got a better percent of total votes four years ago. But seriously, congratulations to Trump for energizing some new voters to come out and vote Republican and obviously the appeal to populism has merit, it is also how Bill Clinton won against the traditional Democratic party orthodoxy of the era of Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis who lost 3 elections in a row until Bill Clinton made the Democrats a more populist party.

Secondly Hillary, she got to 48% of the vote, well below what Obama got in 2012 as a percentage but with the surge in voting nationwide, her vote matched Obama got in 2012 at 65.5 million votes. In a cruel twist of fate, Hillary Clinton for the second time in running for President, managed to get more actual votes than her rival, and lose the race. This was the same matter that happened in 2008 when she ran against Obama in the primaries and got more votes by Democratic party voters but Obama had more 'Super Delegates' and won because that was the rules of the game. Now this time she won more votes but the Electoral College system gave the Presidency to her rival instead. Note also, that Hillary's vote total is tied for second-highest recorded in US election history, no Republican has ever gotten to 65.5 million votes, and no Democrat other than Obama once has exceeded that in 2008.

Now on WHY. From a mathematical point of view, Hillary lost many states that were seen to be 'safe' Democratic states, like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, by razor-thin margins. She did not campaign at all in Michigan and Wisconsin, and while she did campaign well in Pennsylvania, she did then spend plenty of time trying to win states that were 'red' like North Carolina and Arizona, states she ended up 'winning the battles but losing the war'. She won more votes but lost the Presidency. In a way you could say, her campaign got too greedy, they tried to win by a huge landslide in many states and with that, did not give the necessary attention to the states where she was falling behind. (Note, there are also recounts going on in several states, we may see some change in the final results but I am not holding my breath...)

From the strategy point of view, while Trump himself (and even his TV ad spending) seemed to signal a total hodgepodge mess of no focus area at all, his ground game (run by the Republican party, quite independent of Trump's campaign itself) seemed to be well focused and highly effective, in those states that mattered. What should concern any Democratic strategist is, that the Hillary Clinton campaign did not seem to be aware of the pending doom arising out of Wisconsin and Michigan. Her campaign did see that Pennsylvania was tight and kept fighting for i (and most polls showed her mostly ahead in that state) but the WI and MI state results, those should give great concern for the internal measurements that the Democrats failed in, and clearly the Republicans in turn, succeeded in their focus.

If a race is that close, 2% election, then yes a few strange in-state results can swing an election. Even so, because Hillary won the popular vote, she was in the driver's seat and a 0.5% election could well be forgiven to be 'lost by the winner' but when you get 2% more of the vote, then your campaign really should be able to convert that into a national win. That said, both of the recent examples where the winner of the popular vote did not become President, do suggest there may be a systematic bias in favor of the Republican. These two elections seem to show that the gain seems currently to be going to the Republicans in such cases (W Bush vs Gore in year 2000) and this is of course as the EC vote is designed to give some voting imbalance to small states, so a few large states cannot dominate them. And most of the states small by population, are in the middle of the USA, where Republicans do better, and most of the population lives on the edges of the USA where the Democrats do better. It may well be, that the 'natural EC balance' means that a Democrat does have to win by a few points, just to get the Presidency, and the Republican can 'afford to lose' the popular vote by a point or two - but not by five (like Romney vs Obama in 2012) - and still become the President. (Also obviously for ANYONE in numbers, we cannot generalize from only two data points, but these do signal a possible systematic imbalance, and future elections will tell if that is so).

What about the ground game and big data? I have given this part some thought and my working theory is this. I think we have reached essentially parity. And it has some 'obvious' conclusions which now to me seem blatant but I didn't see this before the eleciton. I am sorry I didn't think of this before but to me, this makes the most sense in light of what we've seen happen. But follow me with this logic and see if this makes sense. So I believe we have achieved for practical purposes essentially near-parity. First there was a 'secret weapon' deployed in 2012 but only by one side. So I think a lopsided data-driven modern digital outreach political campaign, driven by targeted big data system, can deliver about 4% beyond what the polling suggests. It was done nationally for the first time in 2012, by the Obama campaign. They ended up outperforming their polling by 4%.

Now for 2016 the Republicans have deployed a rival system. It wasn't as big and as sophisticated as the Democrat machine which itself was fine-tuned and upgraded. But that means, the Republicans would kind of catch-up. Not totally, because they are not at total parity with the Democrats, but they ate significantly into the Democrats' lead. If you look at the aftermath, the Republicans were excited about their data and ground game operations, while the Democrats were downcast. The Democrats had already built a system in 2012 that did about as good as you can get. They could not squeeze more out of it this time. And with their machine running full power, but with an unpopular Hillary at the top of the ticket, they squeezed exactly the same number of voters as what Obama got.

Meanwhile the enthusiasm on the Republican side is similar to what the Democrats felt in 2012. They tried a new system and it worked very well and the ground game delivered several tight races by very slim margins, to the Republicans. It did not give them 4% above the polling what Obama got in 2012, but it did give them half that, 2%. This partly because the Democrats ran a stronger rival system against them; and partly because even in their full effort, the 2016 Republican ground game did not match the size of what Obama built in 2012 (and Hillary now had expanded upon). If the maximum gain of such a system is 4%, and Democrats got that in 2012, they now only matched it, meaning no new voters brought in anymore by using this method on the Democrat side, it was 'baked in'. But the Republicans had not deployed this method before, they did now. They didn't do it as thoroughly and systematically as Obama in 2012 (Trump refusing to play along fully with the ground game data driven inputs and his percentage of Republican vote ended up down vs Romney) but the system DID work and drive only on the Republican side, voter turnout up and thus gave Trump about have the gain he could have gotten in a perfect world, ie 2%.

We will need to wait to see more data about their efforts to measure it, but I am thinking, it means no more gains to Democrats and in the future, slight more gains possible for Republicans if they do it 'properly' the next time. But this is now a new 'normal' both sides will have large database-driven voter outreach programs that will be used to drive up voting turnout.

A minor observation to add. I think what the Democrats seem to have achieved this time is that their strong machine now gave them a false sense of security. Because the system works, and was now OPTIMIZED vs 2012, it did not yield any more voters than before, but it did push Democratic voters to show up early, into early voting. So the early voter data looked particularly promising (and misleading in a very cruel sense) to the Democrats, where they thought this early voter enthusiasm would ALSO then yield more 'fresh voters' for election day, who did not materialize. What the Republicans did particularly well was the 'primary purpose' of such a system, to drive up voting DAY voting in person. And there, the surprise to the Democrats in 2016, is as harsh and hard, as it was to the Romney campaign in 2012. The longer the voting day dragged on, and the results came in, the more the results started to favor the Republicans to a clearly decisive impact.

In 2020 its likely that the Republicans will refine their efforts and use their new powerful tools to also drive early voting. The Democrats will not, cannot abandon these systems and go back to the old way, or they would surrender 4% of the vote instantly. Its likely that in 2020 the Republicans can still outperform polling by about 2% based on the data driven voter turnout processes, which means that if there is an in-built Electoral College advantage worth about 2% and there is a gain to come also worth about 2%, then whoever runs against Trump in 2020, would need to build more than a 4% lead in the polling, just to have a chance to be even... 

That is my working theory for now. Would square with what we witnessed and would also give some insights of what might come in the future. With that, lets move the political comments of the election follow-up here to this posting. 

First Time Anywhere: 12 Biggest Tech/Media Platforms by Audience Reach, aka the 2 Billion Plus Club

Time to publish another first, as the first ever source for a statistic related to tech, mobile, media and advertising. As I do my various workshops and seminars, my clients invariably love my numbers and the one they have most asked for, was a comparison of the different media and communication platforms. Because there wasn't one. And it was a difficult task to try to do. Now I have done it. We have the 12 tech and media with largest reach.

Let me first show why this was nearly impossible before. You would start off with a series of pretty nice numbers, until you understand that some numbers in media are too good while other numbers are too bad. We reading this blog regularly, know that in mobile for example the total count of 7.6 billion mobile subscribers for a planetary human population of 7.4 billion human beings, does not mean there are 7.6 billion humans with a mobile phone. Its not possible, some obviously have two phones or two or more accounts, and some mobile accounts nowadays are used for means that do not involve a human using 'a mobile device' but rather some mobile connections go into various telematics uses like inserted into cars or in our metering devices etc. And this blog was the first to publish mobile unique counts and I have had that data in my Almanac series from its beginning for example. At one side we measure numbers that are too large, like also say the internet count. Many of us have a laptop and a smartphone and use the internet on both. And this can be many ways, we can have a work PC and home PC, separately from our personal laptop, can also have the tablet; and in our pockets can have two smartphones. While we use the internet often primarily on just one or two devices, we, an individual human, can use easily several access methods. Thus if we count total internet users, the number gets too high, and the actual UNIQUE user count is smaller.

But at the other side, we measure numbers which are too small and the actual reach of a given media or technology is far larger than its installed base or its consumption statistics. A newspaper is a perfect example. The total readership of any published newspaper is significantly higher than its circulation, because often we share the newspaper with others. Our family reads (sections of) the same newspaper, or we share the same paper at a coffee shop or the dentist or the bus etc. So when we compare say the internet to newspapers, we need to correctly adjust the internet audience 'downwards' to remove multiple users, but we need also to correctly adjust the newspaper audience 'upwards' to correctly count its total reach, not just its purchased circulation copies (or free copies for free newspapers). This is typical of many mass media. Televisions are counted by household, not by individual 'TV devices' we own. A single working adult could easily own two TV sets ie 2 TVs for one person. But in a large family of 10 in say India, they could have one TV shared by ten. So now we would need to do the 'household conversion' which is dramatically different in a country where the population is shrinking like say Japan or one where the population is dramatically exploding like in Nigeria.  Yes there are some measurements of TV by household penetration rates but there are almost none by audience reach (my Almanac has had for years its highly popular chapter of the Digital Divide that has been exploring these numbers to a modest degree already, like TV penetration rate per household across the rich and emerging worlds; or the internet penetration or mobile phones etc). And certainly none that compare TV household reach to internet reach to newspaper reach. And that all pales in the trouble of measuring the largest media and tech of all time, mobile, which is not only growing so fast, few can keep up with its numbers, but we have BOTH problems of measurement.

Not that many experts of our industry remember that mobile not only has the 'multiple accounts to one person' problem it ALSO has the SHARED mobile problem. This is too easy to forget by most analysts because the behavior is totally alien to us. You and I will not share our phones, not even with our spouces or family members. But in poor parts of the world the poorest may only afford one used handset for the whole family. The dad will have that phone and then it is SHARED with the other family members if the wife wants to talk to her sister or the eldest son wants to call his friend from school. Nobody has measured these concurrent dimensions for mobile except me, of course, the man who obsesses about mobile numbers..

So with all that ado, lets celebrate a new number shared by TomiAhonen Consulting with the world. What are the 12 largest media and tech platforms in the world, by reach of their unique audience, at the start of this year 2016?. As this is the first time this measurement is ever shared by any analyst of any tech or media space, lets do it with proper style, eh? I'll do the list as a Top 12 list starting from number 12 and moving on up to number 1.

12 LARGEST TECH WHEN MEASURED BY UNIQUE AUDIENCE OR UNIQUE REACH

In at number 12: Android. Those who know this blog well, know that Android smartphone current installed base is just out, fresh numbers by TomiAhonen Consulting for October 31, 2016, at 2.2 Billion active devices. (I am among the only sources that does the installed base for smartphone OS platforms). But that is only smartphones. Android also powers tablets! And we don't want the active user count that includes multiple devices owned by one person. What is the unique user count of Android. That according to the TomiAhonen Almanac 2016 edition is... drumroll... 2.1 Billion unique Android users. (PS Apple fans, All Apple devices reach half that but iPhone alone only a bit over 500 million active devices in use). (PSPS Windows users - Windows on all platforms is way smaller than Android now, Windows has already peaked)

What about number 11? We jump quite a bit for the next reach. It clocks in at 2.5 Billion. What reaches 2.5 Billion unique humans on the planet? Its email. Yes trusty old email used from PCs to now increasingly also smartphones. Not total email account number, but unique email reach. If you use email to reach your clients or patients or voters, you get to 2.5B unique humans on the planet, many of us then who have again, of course multiple email accounts.

So we get to number 10. Its the technology that was said to 'change everything' (it didn't. But it changed many things yes). The internet. Yes there are well over 3 billion connected to the internet by now but not by unique user count. TomiAhonen Consulting has counted the unique internet user numbers for years, adjusting for multiple device ownership and usage. And for the start of this year, the internet had 2.8 Billion unique users. Understand now when you consider ANY of your fave internet tech ideas in context. Facebook, is by definition smaller by unique users than the total internet unique users, because FB is an internet service. It does not fit inside our Top 12. Same goes for Google search or Yahoo or Amazon or Twitter or whatever is on the internet. TOTAL unique audience reach by the internet is only 2.8 Billion. It only clocks the internet into our Top 12 low at number 10. Does not (yet) reach even half the planet.

UPDATE - We had a quick discussion with my dear friend Torgo, ie Dan Appelquist the author formerly of Vodafone and O2 who is now with Samsung. We chatted on Twitter, about the internet numbers. He wanted to know how many of this 2.8 Billion unique internet user count is mobile users with modern browsers on reasonably fast networks. Well, the Almanac tells us that 300 million use internet only from a PC ie never use mobile, so lets remove those. That leaves us with 2.5 Billion. Of those there still are some who are on WAP and some who are not on 3G and some even not on 2.5G GPRS/EDGE. In rough terms I'd say thats now under 200 million of those, so we'd be at about 2.3 Billion unique humans who access the internet via mobile phone (excluding tablets) who use a modern HTML browser (excluding WAP) and are on a reasonably fast connetion typically 3G or faster but also including 2.5G GPRS/EDGE. Note, this is still well more than total unique users of Android on smartphones and tablets, combined, and by a clear margin. Why? Because iPhone users also have browsers, and there are plenty of 'featurephone' mid-priced dumbphones that have a full HTML browser. So for Torgo: the number of unique mobile internet users on phones with modern HTML connectivity is about 2.3 Billion (or 82% of all unique internet users). 


But ahead of the internet by reach of unique audience is... MMS. Yes, at 2.9 Billion unique audience, we have MMS. I do not mean that you and I SHARE PICTURES on MMS. MMS is not the 'Picture Messaging Service'. It is not 'PMS' haha. It is MMS, Multimedia Messaging Service. MULTIMEDIA. Delivering MEDIA to mobile users. Videos, pictures, coupons, boarding passes, offers, QR codes, web links, sounds. MMS is a MEDIA platform that yes, reaches a LARGER UNIQUE AUDIENCE THAN THE INTERNET. (Oh, and MMS as an industry is larger than say.. total smartphone apps, haha... so don't think MMS is dead or stupid. Did you know Air Asia the largest discount airline in Asia, has stopped using human check-in counters at its KLIA-2 hub in Kuala Lumpur? Yes, they don't DO HUMAN check-in anymore. Why? Mobile! Most of their check-in is delivered via mobile phones, and if not, you can also do internet check in or use a kiosk at the airport. No human check-in anymore!). Yes, advertising, yes airline boarding passes, yes coupons.

Gosh, yes, how's this for an idea - gift cards! I just heard from my friend John Stuckey in Australia who has a company that does mobile gift cards, they are called Crackawines, gift cards to give wine. Great Australian wines. Wanna give a nice gift to your friend via mobile and are in the wine business? Use MMS of course, the person who receives the gift can see the image of the wine label and redeem the gift at a store. How awesome is this? MMS. Has a unique reach of 2.9 Billion humans who USE the service (at least once per month) and note, most who use MMS don't know they are using it, they think they received an SMS with a picture! Many companies even talk about MMS this way, they say we send SMS with pictures. (They actually send MMS). Or an airline will say, take your boarding pass via mobile, sent via text message. You end up receiving.. an MMS. More active users than the internet! That is our MMS. More money than total apps industry. That is our 'failure' haha, of MMS. MMS reaches 2.9 Billion unique humans (or nearly three times the reach of say Whatsapp globally. Do not confuse heavy USAGE by addicted users, on Whatsapp, for REACH which is what any media or advertiser wants. MMS has reach).

THE 3 BILLION UNIQUE USER OR AUDIENCE CLUB

Lets move on, what about number 8, now we cross into the rare 3 Billion sphere of giant reach. At 3.2 Billion we get total planetary reach of all digital/satellite/cable TV systems, combined. Premium TV services (not counting terrestrial broadcast TV that we receive via a standard antenna). if you are say a CNN or HBO or the Discovery Channel, you are at a FRACTION of this number. Because obviously no cable TV service is in every country on every cable system. But cable TV as a platform (including satellite and digital TV systems and internet TV broadcasters) reaches yes 3.2 Billion unique humans. 

Then at number 7, just barely ahead of cable/satellite TV, but on its decline, we have the total reach of... landline telephone. Landline telephone has still an active reach of 3.25 Billion humans living in households where a fixed landline telephone connection is still up and running (increasingly younger families are 'cutting the cord' ie going mobile-only in their telephone needs, a trend first observed in Finland and first reported .. by me). Now, if you try to call those 3.25 Billion people on their still-functional landline phone, you'll often find that the call is not answered because we have learned that nobody important calls us on the landline phone, as we all have personal mobile phones, anyone who needs 'us' calls us directly on the mobile. That is why many families have the situation where the dad is angrily yelling out at the kids, will someone please answer the phone? And the kids know not to answer, its not for them, its likely a sales call anyway. But if you DO do telemarketing for example, now for the first time we have the table where all the different communication tech are compared and ranked. Fixed landline telecoms reaches yes, 3.25 Billion unique humans in the world. Not that they'd all answer your call, but that reach is stlll live today. It will be less next year.

But right immediately above landlines, in at number 6, we have that tech among these 12, that has the highest proportion of reach among kids. Driven by very young kids who won't own phones or go to the internet, but can watch a Disney DVD, yes, we have the reach of DVD/Blueray disk players, at 3.4 Billion unique humans globally. If you want to publish your content, a movie or TV show for example, via a DVD, then you have a potential reach of 3.4 Billion human beings worldwide.

REACH LITERALLY HALF OF THE PLANET WITH THESE: THE TOP 5

None of those major tech reach half of humans alive, but these last 5 giants do. In at number 5, reaching a whopping 3.7 Billion unique human beings, and yes, literally reaching half of all human beings alive on the planet, is the reach of mobile voice calls. If do a service using mobile voice, its active user base is 3.7 Billion humans (many of us no longer use mobile voice at all, some are only using internet voice services like Skype, others use their mobile devices only for data services like SMS text messging or the internet etc, and obviously some of the mobile accounts are not even connected to a 'phone'). Mobile voice, yes, reaches 3.7 Billion unique humans but note that this is not the primary use of a 'mobile phone' or a 'cellphone' anymore. Lets stop calling it a mobile 'phone' lets just call it a 'mobile'. We use it more for things like selfies (ie its more used as a camera) and far far more for messaging than as a voice calling device. But the US elections for example during the month of September, had 2.6 Billion 'robocalls' delivered to American telephones. They were voice recordings, mostly about the election, and these 'advertisements' resulted in about 8 recordings delivered on average to every American alive (whether voting age or not, the recording will not know if you are a registered voter or say an undocumented immigrant housekeeper who happened to answer the phone). Yes, the 5th largest technology by reach, on the planet, is mobile voice telephony services. Voice calls reach 3.7 Billion unique humans today.

THE TOP 4 OF THE 4 BILLION CLUB

And ahead of mobile voice? At 4.1 Billion unique users on the planet, the fourth largest communication or media by reach on the planet is SMS text messaging! SMS texting is not dying because of Whatsapp (what silly nonsense, SMS is four TIMES larger by reach of ACTIVE users globally, most who have shifted MOST of their messaging to Whatsapp, even most of those can still be reached via SMS, who still happily use SMS for such things as televoting or for example authenticating a pin code with their banking. Again, do not mistake USAGE with REACH. Whatsapp has the heaviest usage of messaging. Whatsapp is a peanut compared to SMS by active user reach. If you are a media or advertiser, you want REACH of active user base). Before we get to the Top 3, let me make these two finer points about SMS, SMS text messaging is the largest tech by reach of any INTERACTIVE media platform. And it is the largest tech by reach of any COMMERCE-capable platform ie it can do payments. You can enable your Coca Cola machines to take mobile payments (via SMS, as invented by.. Coca Cola  - in Finland - literally two decades ago. Mobile payments were not invented by Apple three years ago). So SMS text messaging? It today reaches a massive 4.1 Billion active users. That is 55% of the planet's total population alive.

So lets get to the Top 3. At number 3, is radio. FM radio has a global listening audience reach of 4.3 Billion human beings. And it often comes as a surprise that for many in the rich 'West' who see handset makers put FM radio onto their smartphones, they wonder, who uses that? And they do not know that for many people in poor parts of the world like in Bangladesh or Bolivia or Botswana, a family may have their first-ever FM radio of the family, be the one that came 'free' as a function on their new mobile phone that dad just bought. And in many parts of the world, hundreds of millions of people in India for example, the commercial viability of FM radio is not practical for delivery of FM radio at all. Yes, there is NO FM RADIO COVERAGE for parts of the world where literally hundreds of millions of people live. They are too poor to then sustain an ecosystem where they buy the FM radio gadgets and the advertisers could fund the radio stations to offer programing. Still with all that, FM radio is at number 3, the third largest reach of any tech on the planet, of a unique audience of 4.3 Billion human beings.

THE TWO IN THE 5 BILLION UNIQUE AUDIENCE SET

Who is at number 2? Its ... drumroll ... television. Yes, when all forms of TV are included, broadcast 'over-the-air' basic TV to cable and satellite systems, as a whole TV is the second largest media and communication platform on the planet, by unique audience reach. TV reaches 5.2 Billion unique humans on the planet. That is 70% of the planet. A large portion of those are kids by the way, in countries of large family size, the utility of one TV to give entertainment for the whole family is considerable. But TV is number 2. And you know me, and this blog, then number 1 can only be...

THE ONLY ONE REACHING LITERALLY 3 OF EVERY 4 HUMANS ALIVE

Biggest reach on the planet? It had to be .. drumroll .. more drumroll .. Tomi give us the number already! .. more drumroll .. its mobile of course. Mobile phones reach a unique audience of 5.7 Billion human beings, when all uses of mobile are included, SMS and voice calls at the top, and when multiple phones are removed, telematics accounts are removed, and multiple accounts (SIM cards) are removed; but when reach of shared users of mobile phones in poor families, are then added in. Its not even close to number 2. Mobile, yes mobile has a reach of 5.7 Billion humans globally! If you want to sell something, send a media, show some news, make an advertisement, send a coupon, or offer a customer, patient, student, voter etc to enact with you, the largest reach media and tech, by unique audience is.. mobile. 77% of the planet today can be reached by mobile. Note that some who use mobile messaging have stopped using (paid cellular) voice altogether, while others who use mobile cannot use messaging because they are illiterate and ONLY use voice, etc, but total reach, mobile rules. And among mobile's individual services, obviously SMS is the largest among mobile far bigger than voice calls, MMS, the internet or something like an app on Android etc.

MISSING FROM THE TOP 12: FACEBOOK, WINDOWS, AMAZON, SKYPE, YOUTUBE, WHATSAPP ETC

Lets also note who is  NOT in the Top 12. Facebook is not one of the 12 largest tech and media on the planet, not even close. Twitter isn't on the list, neither is Instagram or Snapchat. Google search is not on the list, doesn't make the top 12 most widest-reaching tech and media, by unique users. Windows. Windows on PCs and tablets and even the rare smartphone. Windows once was a Top 12 largest used tech on the planet, now? Nowhere close. Pokemon Go was the big craze this summer but it doesn't crack the Top 12. Neither does the most-played downloaded game of all time, Angry Birds doesn't get into the Top 12. Skype isn't there. Amazon doesn't get into Top 12. Apple with all its iGadgets and iToys doesn't climb into the Top 12. Whatsapp isn't in the Top 12. YouTube does not fit into the Top 12. All those are tech darling stories of yes, biggish numbers, for a tech IT industry, but not the 12 largest. They are big but not giants. This is your list of the real planetary giants. Not the pretenders. Not those who MAY some day be big. These are the only 12 tech that each has at least 2 Billion unique active users, audience members or reach.

That is the big news today. Here is the table you want: Feel free to share this with all your media and advertising colleagues, they will love you for finding this information. Many in media and advertising call this table the 'holy grail' of the media reach stats. It seemed like an impossible number ever to pin down. Yes, you're welcome. Here, courtesy of TomiAhonen Consulting, as of 5 December 2016, for the first time ever published by any analyst, the 12 largest tech and media by reach of their unique audiences, in one table:

LARGEST MEDIA AND TECH BY REACH OF UNIQUE AUDIENCE, JANUARY 1, 2016:
1 . . . Mobile  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Billion (77% of Humans Alive)
2 . . . Television . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Billion (70%)
3 . . . Radio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Billion (58%)
4 . . . SMS Text Messaging . . . . . . . . 4.1 Billion (51%)
5 . . . Mobile Voice Calls . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Billion (50%)
6 . . . DVD & Blueray Player . . . . . . . 3.4 Billion (46%)
7 . . . Landline Telephone . . . . . . . . . 3.35 Billion (45%)
8 . . . Cable/Satellite TV . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Billion (44%)
9 . . . MMS Multimedia Messaging . . 2.9 Billion (39%)
10 . . Internet  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.8 Billion (38%)
11 . . Email  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Billion (34%)
12 . . Android  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Billion (28%)
Source: TomiAhonen Almanac 2016 (page 103)
This table may be freely shared

So thats the big news. You're welcome. This information has not been anywhere, and just watch the expression on the faces of your colleagues in media or advertising when they learn that this information EXISTS now!. Send them here to read this blog! It will make YOU the hero to them, for discovering this gold.

The TomiAhonen Almanac 2016 edition that just came out a few months ago, had this data in it, so those who bought the Almanac already had it (and those of my clients who used me in their workshops recently), but no other source, free or paid, has published this info in any source, no matter what you paid. And its only one of 100 tables and charts in the TomiAhonen Almanac 2016 which of course has all the mobile numbers you could want from consumers to devices to services to revenues to apps to traffic etc. See more here TomiAhonen Almanac 2016.

That is what I do. I go for the numbers. And once again, this blog has broken a new statistic for the world, that was never calculated before. You're welcome! Consider it a 'Pikkujoululahja' a gift from me, for 'Little Christmas' as we celebrate 'pre-Christmas' in Finland around this time of the year. And yes, this is the Top 12. If you want the Top 20, then you do have to go through all that pain of spending a totally massive crippling expense of .. 10 Euros haha, to buy the Almanac which then adds the unique count of all tech that reach 1 Billion active users or more, the other 8 into that top 20. The Almanac is here.