Analytics
Below are some recent figures that should sway you of the power of SMaSh:
1. SMS is the king of mobile messaging.
• Portio Research (January 2011): 6.9 SMS trillion messages were sent in 2010. SMS traffic is expected to break 8 trillion in 2011.
• 249 billion MMS were sent in 2010.
• Portio says: “Messaging is still king. We want to be absolutely clear about this. Messaging still dominates [mobile operators’] non-voice revenues worldwide”. Worldwide mobile messaging market will be worth over US$200 billion in 2011 (SMS is $127 billion of this), reaching $334.7 billion by 2015.
• Juniper Research (May 2011): By 2016, application-to-person (A2P) messaging will overtake person-to-person (texting) messaging, being worth more than US$70B.
• IDC (February 2012): Total shipments in 2011 were 491.4 million units up 61.3 percent from 2010. This makes smartphones 31.8 percent of all handsets shipped.
• Strategy Analytics (February 2012): Total shipments in 2011 were 488.5 million units up 63.1 percent from 2010. This makes smartphones 31.5 percent of all handsets shipped.
2. Time for a mobiThinking reality check on smartphones
The media tends to overemphasize the importance of smartphones. Before media
hype lulls you into focusing your marketing/development budget on smartphones and sleek platforms exclusively, consider this:
- 61.3 percent of handsets sold in 2011 were not smartphones, they were feature phones
- 94 percent of all phones sold were not Apple brands.
- Smartphone sales is not the same as market penetration. Market penetration of smartphones will be lower thank feature phone for the foreseeable future.
There are almost 6 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide (Source: ITU), yet only 968.2 million smartphones have been sold in total in 2009, 2010 and 2011, according to IDC, i.e. only 16 percent of global mobile subscriptions are smartphones.
Let’s put it another way:
For every one of your customers who buys a smartphone, at least two will buy a feature phone. People will continue to buy feature phones for as long as they continue to fulfill their basic needs: calls, SMS, email, mobile Web, etc.
Learn more about how we access this enormous market here.