Written by Noric Dilanchian  |  14 April 2005 

Listen up owners, creators and developers of content for mobile phones! Here is a top 10 list of mobile phone statistics care of BuddeComm and Deloittes. We explored the implications of the statistics below at an i-mode legal hypothetical for content creators and developers in April 2005 at lab.3000 in Melbourne. 

Mobile Phone Statistics - Market in Australia

Source: various reports at BuddeComm http://www.budde.com.au/ (Paul Budde Communications Pty Ltd) Tel: (+61) 2 4998 8144

1. 300 million SMS messages per month are sent in Australia (that's almost 4 billion a year).


2. 300 SMS messages are sent per year on average, per subscriber.


3. Messaging with SMS and other means is worth up to 15% of telco revenues, the rest is typically for voice and content.


4. Users spend an average Aust$14 per month on SMS compared to Aust$55 per month on voice.


5. 16-20 year olds spend $24 per month on SMS (twice the average of all users).


6. 2 million children and teenagers are using mobile phones in Australia.

Paul Budde notes that as 15 - 30 year olds mature they should respond well to additional functionality for mobile communication.

Mobile Phone Statistics - Global Market

Source: Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu in "TMT Trends: Predictions, 2005: A focus on the mobile and wireless sector".

7. US$2 billion is spent annually buying ring tones.


8. By the end of 2005 the size of the global market for voice services, both fixed and mobile, will be approaching US$1 trillion.


9. 2 billion cellular mobile subscriptions will be in place by the end of 2005. That is one third of the estimated world population of 6.5 billion. [Editor's update on 21 September 2005: According to Gartner (an international research company) Nokia sold 31.9 per cent of all phones in the world in the second quarter of 2005, followed by US Motorola with 17.9 per cent and Korean Samsung Electronics with 12.8 per cent. The growth is now coming from large, less well-developed markets such as China, India, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa.]


10. Mobile phone communications are 10 years old, the PC is 20 years old.

Deloitte claims that by the end of 2005 the mobile phone "...will be the most rapidly-growing and widely-adopted technology of all time."

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