Data drives mobile phone growth to 4bn users

Data is driving the growth of mobile phone subscriptions in developed countries as the total number of users worldwide hits a nominal figure of 4 billion for the first time, according to the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO).
It reports that the number of mobile phone users will rise from 3.9 billion in 2008 to 4.4 billion in 2009, an increase of 12 percent. While EITO says this means that two-thirds of the world population use a mobile phone, there is a query on how many of these subscriptions are active as users move between pre-paid services.

“The strongest growth in the use of mobile phones now comes from newly industrialized and developing countries”, says EITO chairman Bruno Lamborghini. The number of mobile phone users in India is expected to increase by 32 percent in the year 2009 to 457 million. In Brazil, the number of mobile phone users will rise by 14 percent to 172 million and in China by 12 percent to 684 million.

In industrialized countries, growth rates are considerably smaller as levels of mobile phone use are already high and the numbers are less reliable. In the European Union, EITO predicts that the number of mobile phone accounts will increase by 4 percent to 641 million in 2009. This means there are considerably more mobile contracts in the EU than inhabitants, pointing to the issue in the overall figures.
However, portable multimedia is driving strong growth in developed countries.

“In Europe, the USA and Japan, the trend is for high-quality multimedia mobiles with Internet access”, says Lamborghini.

The number of UMTS accounts in the EU will increase by 36 percent to around 172 million in 2009, while the number of conventional accounts on the basis of so-called GSM technology will decrease by 5 percent to 469 million. Turnover in the area of mobile data services is also growing strongly in the EU and will increase by 10 percent to around € 33 billion in 2009.
In the UK, the number of UMTS accounts will increase by 40 percent to around 33 million according to EITO. making two thirds of the around 81 million mobile phone accounts in the UK are UMTS-capable. In Italy the total number of mobile phone accounts will increase in 2009 by 2 percent to around 93 million, 31 million will be UMTS-capable (26 percent).
A similar picture emerges in the USA. It is estimated that the number of UMTS users there will increase by 74 percent to 108 million this year. The number of conventional GSM accounts will decrease by 7 percent to 177 million. The Japanese are the forerunners when it comes to mobile data use. In Japan, 90 percent of all mobile phones are already connected to fast third-generation data networks.