Today, worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion — equivalent to half the global population, according to research firm Informa.
Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world.
“The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth,” Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement.
In recent years the industry has seen surging growth in outskirts of China and India, helped by constantly falling phone and call prices, with cellphone vendors already eyeing inroads into Africa’s countryside to keep up the growth.
The Nordic start for mobile telephony was the basis for the success stories of Nokia and Ericsson.
Fast growth in Asian wireless markets has since helped Korean Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics as well as China’s ZTE take their place among the top six cellphone vendors globally.
But although mobile subscriptions have reached the equivalent of 50 percent of the population, this does not mean that half the people in the world now have a mobile phone, since Informa said 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent — where some owners have more than one phone.
“The economic difference between the more mature markets and those in developing countries is highlighted by the vast differences in operators’ revenues per user,” Informa said. Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 has an average revenue per user (ARPU) of just over $70 a month in Britain, while Hutchison’s Sri Lankan operator counts revenues of below $3 per user.
According to the International Programs Center of the U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the world reached 6,634,294,193 on Thursday.
According to global trade body GSM Association, about 80% of cellular users world-wide use the GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) technology, or 2,571,563,279 people. The second largest mobile technology, CDMA (Code Division, Multiple Access), had 421.4 million users at end September.
Last year, on passing 2 billion GSM users, the GSM Association said China was the largest single GSM market in the world, with more than 370 million users, followed by Russia with 145 million, India with 83 million and the USA with 78 million users. In India, mobile has even become the fastest selling consumer product - pushing bicycles to the number two spot. “India Broadband Wireless and WiMAX Market Analysis and Forecasts” estimates that there will be up to 21 million WiMAX subscribers in India by 2014.
