How big is the mobile phone industry?

The official count by Informa, the telecoms analyst company considered to provide the official subscriber counts, which is used by the various industry associations, manufacturers etc. Informa's report, Mobile Market Status 2007 gave the final count for the end of the year 2006 of mobile phone subscriptions at 2,704,661,000. As a percentage of total human population, it means there is a mobile phone subscription for 41.4% of the human race.

The mobile telecoms industry earned 725 Billion dollars last year. 135 Billion of that was mobile data revenues (the majority of which is SMS text messaging but over 45 billion dollars was mobile content revenues). The mobile data industry is rapidly cannibalizing other industries - global music industry earns 16% of its revenues from mobile phones (mostly ringing tones); videogaming earns 14% of its global revenues from mobile.

The mobile telecoms industry grew by 16.8% last year - many times the rate of global GDP growth, but the sheer economics of these numbers mask enormous success. The growth in dollar terms, from 2005 to 2006, was 105 billion dollars. A 725 Billion dollar industry which grew by over 100 Billion. Before the decade is over, mobile telecoms will be bigger than the global automobile industry, or the global armaments industry, or the worldwide airplane manufacturing business. And yes, mobile telecoms service business, not counting handsets sold or networks, is already twice as big as the global IT (computer-side, not counting telecoms) industry.

Data service revenues in mobile (so if we ignore the phone as a voice device, and only consider the data services side of this gadget), at 135 billion dollars in 2006, are as big as - the total internet content industry, plus the internet advertising revenues, plus the global videogaming revenues, plus hollywood box office revenues worldwide, plus the global music industry, combined.

Source: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/04/27_billion_phon.html

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