John Whelan is Off Portal and Off Net!

Japan accounts for 59% of mobile internet usage worldwide!

An interesting paper
from The International University of Japan published earlier this year has some interesting stats on mobile internet usage. These data are always hard to find reliably as they are very precious and sensitive from an MNO point of view. Anyway to summarise some key findings:

- more than 1.5 billion mobile users worldwide
- 25 percent of the world'’s population owned a mobile phone in June 2004
- this generated in excess of $1.5 trillion in service revenues
- however (here it comes) only a small sub-segment of this population subscribed to or used the mobile internet.
- as of January 2004, there were 115 million mobile data subscribers globally who generated in excess of US$61 billion within the entire 2004 calendar year
- while Japan and three of its Asia Pacific neighbors comprised
only 9 percent of the world's mobile subscriber base, Japan alone represented 59 percent of the world'’s mobile data subscribers as of January 2004

So while these figures are from last year as we enter 2006 I don't think we in Europe can afford to be complacent about the challenge facing the mobile internet industry here.

As always I think the figures in Europe are in reality worse. Thsi is because in this research mobile internet is defined as:
"data-driven usage of a mobile network either for text communications or mobile content or service access". In other words texting an e-mail are included as part of the greater mobile internet. The real figure we need is actual consumption of pure mobile data content services and these data are even harder to find.

posted by alatto @ 9:48 AM