Every week, MEF Minute find the latest industry stats and reports from across the global mobile industry. Here we present a round up of all the reports and sources from throughout the month by sector.
Mobile commerce
- 56 per cent of US adults bought a product using an app in 2015 – More than half of all US adults – and 70 per cent of millennials – are now using their phones to buy products and services, says a study of mobile commerce habits by Verizon.
- Mobile powering $2.1 trillion annual e-commerce spend on payment cards – Online spend using payment cards will grow up to $5 trillion in the next four years, says research firm RBR.
- US holiday spending by mobile up 59 per cent – New stats from ComScore reveal total digital spend for the US holiday season reached $69.1 billion. Mobile commerce comprised $12.7 billion of it.
- Mobile will comprise 45 per cent of US e-commerce by 2020 – Business Insider forecasts that, by 2020, mobile will account for 45 per cent of the US’s $632 billion total e-commerce sales. In 2014, it comprised 11.6 per cent of a $303 billion market.
Apps
- Google Play growing faster than Apple App Store – but iOS is where the money is – A new report by app tracker App Annie says Google Play Store downloads were almost double those of the Apple App Store in 2015.
- Apple users spent $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases over Christmas and New Year – The 2015/16 holiday season was the biggest ever for its Apple App Store, with January 1 2016 the biggest single day in its history.
- WhatsApp closing in on its one billionth user – An interview on Wired reveals that the chat app WhatsApp has attracted 990 million users – making it the second-most popular app on Earth after Facebook.
- Facebook in-app ad network is now a $1 billion dollar business – The Facebook Audience Network has passed $1bn in annual run rate after just over a year since launch.
Mobile Industry
- India has one billion mobile subscriptions – After an end of year surge, India finally achieved its one billionth mobile connection in 2015 says the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
- One billion cellular M2M subscribers by 2022 – Global ‘machine to machine’ connections will grow by 23 per cent a year, says Berg Insight. The analyst says the total number of cellular M2M subscribers reached 265.2 million at the end of 2015, and will hit nine figures by 2022.
- Four billion people still do not have access to the Internet – The World Bank’s 2016 World Development Report reveals there are now 3.2 billion Internet users worldwide, and yet nearly four billion — 60 per cent of the world population – are still offline.
- 688 million Chinese citizens are connected to the internet – The number of Chinese ‘netizens’ surged by 39 million in 2015. As of December 2015, more than half of China’s population was connected, says the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
- Four in ten consumers would switch networks if their subs came with streaming music – A new study by MusiComms also revealed that nearly 25 per cent would buy streaming services from car manufacturers and 15 per cent would buy from providers of cable, telco or satellite.
- Google controls 64.8 per cent of US search volume – Two thirds of all desktop searches go through Google, says comScore – down 0.6 per cent in a year.
Devices
- 50 million 4G phones to ship in India this year – A new report from CyberMedia Research reveals the Indian smartphone segment grew 32 per cent in 2015 to deliver around 95 million device shipments.
- Smartphone lull? Only 48 per cent of consumers plan to buy a new one this year – Accenture has identified signs of consumer boredom with mobile tech. It found that 48 per cent expect to buy a new phone this year – that’s down 6 points from last year.
- Windows 10 Mobile is running on one million phones – Microsoft has revealed that its Windows 10 OS is on 200 million devices. That’s 180 million PCs, 18 million Xbox One consoles and over one million Windows 10 Mobile devices.
- Fingerprint scanners to drive biometrics industry to $1.8bn – The global biometric sensor market is set to grow from $710 million in 2014 to $1.8 billion by 2023, says a new report by Transparency Market Research. That represents a 9.6 per cent annualised increase.
- 228 million connected wearables will ship in 2020 – A new report from Berg Insight says connected wearables shipped 72.5 million in 2015, up from 25.3 million in the previous year. At the current rate of growth they will reach 228.3 million units in 2020.
New tech
- Virtual reality to generate $5.1 billion in sales this year – Superheat Research predicts consumers will spend over $5 billion on VR hardware and software this year. That will equate to 56 million devices in the market.
- VR revenues set to pass $1 billion for the first time – Sales of 2.5 million VR headsets and 10 million compatible games will propel the VR market to its first billion dollar year in 2016, says the 15th edition Deloitte’s annual tech predictions.
- 4.5 million developers are working on IoT projects – An Internet of Things study by Vision Mobile reports there were 4.5 million IoT developers in the world at the end of 2015, and that this will grow to 9.7 million by 2020.
