Each week the MEF team curates mobile stories from around the world. Essential news you may have missed, the latest market insight & data nuggets, the Global News Round-up offers an instant international mobile content and commerce snapshot.
Global News Stories
End Of An Era, As Nokia Shareholders Approve $7.2BN Deal For Sale Of Devices Business To Microsoft
Tech Crunch
Nokia’s shareholders have approved the sale of its devices & services unit to Microsoft at an EGM held today in Helsinki, the FT reports. The transaction is still expected to close in the first quarter of next year (subject to regulatory approvals), with Nokia in a caretaker role of its own mobile making division until early 2014.
Mobile Worth $350bn in Latin America by 2020
Mobile Marketing Magazine
The mobile industry currently contributes $211bn or 3.7 per cent of Latin America’s GDP, set to rise to $350bn or 4.5 per cent by 2020.
Mobile penetration is only 52 per cent, according to the GSMA’s Mobile Economy Latin America 2013 report, or 319m unique subscriptions, giving plenty of room for growth. This figure does however exceed the average for developing economies, which sits at 38 per cent, but still falls short of numbers seen in developed markets.
Tablets Are Becoming More Important Than Smartphones For Online Shopping, But Retailers Aren’t Ready
Business Insider
This year will mark a major milestone for tablets and their influence on Internet retailers. We believe tablets will draw even with smartphones, and account for 50% of the total value of U.S. retail sales made over mobile devices.
How is it that tablets are beginning to overtake the smartphone for retail, despite the fact that there are fewer tablets than smartphones in consumer hands?
Read More… (report)
Showrooming has not killed Best Buy — yet
Mobile Commerce Daily
Best Buy is beginning to make a turnaround after many assumed that showrooming would kill off the specialty electronics retailer. Although competitive pricing and a bigger focus on loyalty are steps in the right direction, the retailer is banking significantly on mobile to prove its worth this holiday season.
Mobile contributes $211 billion to Latin American economy
Mobile Entertainment
The industry also employed 353,000 people and generated more than $39 billion to public funding. Mobile has directly impacted the Latin America economy to the tune of $211 billion, generating over 3.7 per cent of the region’s GDP (gross domestic product), reports the GSMA.
Gartner: 456M Phones Sold In Q3, 55% Of Them Smartphones; Android At 82% Share, Samsung A Flat Leader
Tech Crunch
Last year, Strategy Analytics made the prediction that we may have approached “peak Android” for how big a market share the operating system may be able to attain in the U.S. market. Fast forward to today, and it’s clear that Android is continuing to grow worldwide — although its biggest OEM, Samsung, may be the one that has reached a ceiling of sorts.
Will U.S. consumers and retailers ever be ready for NFC?
Mobile Commerce Daily
Last year, experts thought that NFC was going to really take off in 2013, but recent moves from Google Wallet and Isis point to a significant question: Will NFC ever really take off?
On Wednesday, Google Wallet launched a physical card, suggesting that its NFC application is not doing the job. Isis recently created an Alliance Program for merchants, implying that retailers are struggling to adopt NFC on their own and require the help and comfort of a network system.
How Snapchat Plans To Make Money
Business Insider
Last week, news broke that a ~2.5 year old company called Snapchat had rejected an all-cash $3 billion takeover offer from Facebook. Predictably, the cat-calls and howls of indignation began. Snapchat and its investors were obviously delusional idiots, Twitter pundits agreed. And arrogant! How else could they pass on a crazy offer from a “desperate” Facebook? Snapchat doesn’t even have revenue. Even a one billion dollar offer for a company like that was “insane,” let alone a three billion-dollar offer. If anyone needed confirmation that we’re right back in a “tech bubble,” this was it.
Why India’s Carrier Billing Platform Market Is Heating Up
Medianama
India has seen a series of recent developments in the carrier billing space, especially related to platforms that aggregate mobile carriers and allow publishers from both the mobile Internet and mobile applications space the ability to enable payments via telecom operators.
Global News Round-up – These articles are not written by MEF and do not represent any views of individuals, members or the organisation.
