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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 and payments

 Mobile Advertising

  • Mobile key to global ad spend rising 4.4 per cent this year – Advertisers will spent $90 billion on mobile-specific ads in 2017 – that’s 44 per cent of all online ad investment. The buoyant channel is helping global ad spend to hit $561 billion this year, despite economic uncertainty and cooling interest in desktop and traditional sectors. These are the key findings of analyst WARC.
  • China’s mobile ad spend set to rise and reach $25.5bn in 2016 – Never mind the economic slowdown, China’s digital economy is on a path to double by 2020. New stats from eMarketer says digital ad spend will reach $40.42 billion in 2016, then climb to $83.59 billion in four years. Within this, spending on display and search ads delivered to mobile devices will hit $14.54 billion and $10.96 billion – around $25.5 billion overall.
  • Digital advertising and marketing spend will equal ‘traditional’ for the first time in 2016 – Annual spending on advertising and marketing will reach $473 billion this year, with $228 billion of it on digital. According to Outsell’s Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2016, the market overall will grow 4.7 per cent, while digital will grow 12.5 per cent.
  • Instagram now has 200,000 advertisers – A year ago, Instagram didn’t have any advertisers. Now it has 200,000 after owner Facebook decided to open up the image sharing site to brands. Instagram advertisers can plug into Facebook’s sophisticated and successful ad back end. This lets them devise campaigns targeted to specific demographic groups.

Mobile Industry/General

  • App economy could be worth $101 billion in four years – There was barely any such thing as an app ecosystem before 2008. Now, it’s on its way to being a $100 billion industry. A new report by App Annie contents that the total app economy could double in size to $101 billion by 2020.
  • Mobile added $43 billion to Australia’s economy in 2015 – Australians are using mobile to work faster and more efficiently – and that’s adding huge sums to the economy, says a new report by Deloitte. It found that Australia’s economy was $42.9 billion larger in 2015 than it would otherwise have been.
  • IoT at retail to generate $53.75 billion by 2022 – The retail sector is preparing for huge changes in its supply chain, customer experience and sales channels – all driven by IoT tech. And the overall impact, says Grand View Research, will generate $53.75 billion in sales within six years.
  • GSMA’s ‘sign in with mobile’ service now available to 2bn – Mobile Connect is the operators’ project to encourage consumers to use their mobiles to log in for third party services. Now, it can reach 2bn people. The GSMA says 34 network operators in 21 countries have launched.
  • Global mobile data traffic up 400x in 15 years – In 2001 there was barely any such thing as mobile data. Now, traffic is at 3.7 exabytes a month. That’s the headline finding of Cisco’s Visual Networking Index.
  • Four in ten smartphone owners regular use voice recognition – Parks Associates’ 360 View: Mobility and the App Economy report says 38 per cent of smartphone owners are now using voice recognition apps, and among the 18-24 age group it’s 48 per cent.
  • 934 million people check their Facebook apps every day – Facebook’s financials reveal nearly all of its users access the social network on their phones. In the last quarter, 1.04 billion consumers checked their Facebook accounts on a typical day – and 934 million of them did so via a mobile app.

Handsets & Wearables

  • Shipments of wearables set to grow 38.2 per cent this year – More devices, more form factors and more awareness will drive the wearable market to shipments of 237.1 million by 2020. The numbers come from IDC, which says this year’s figure will be 110m.
  • Sales of wearables set for 18.4 per cent jump – Vendors will sell 274.59 million smartwatches, fitness bands and other wearable devices this year, says Gartner. The sales will generate $28.7 billion. This represents an 18 per cent jump on 2015.
  • Oppo sold 50m smartphones last year – Chinese phone maker Oppo has broken into the world’s top ten after posting year-on-year growth of 67 per cent last year. The company sold 50m smartphones, enough to move it into the top ten smartphone brands worldwide, according to researcher TrendForce.
  • Apple controls two thirds of the world’s smartwatch shipments – New numbers from Canalys reveal Apple as the major force in smartwatches – though Fitbit leads the wearable sector as a whole.
  • iPhone sales have flatlined at 75m a year – For the first time ever, Apple has failed to increase its iPhone shipments. Its latest financials show device sales stalled at 75m for the year. In spite of this, Apple still posted record quarterly revenue of $75.9 billion.
  • Windows Phone sales now at 4.5m a quarter – Microsoft’s latest financials reveal that it sold 4.5 million Lumia phones during the fourth quarter. That’s down 57 percent on the 10.5 million sold a year ago. However, the Surface tablet posted all-time high revenue of $1.35 billion.
  • Five million people have a Google Cardboard VR set – While the early adopters wait for Oculus Rift and Vive, Google’s ultra-cheap Cardboard VR headset has gathered 5m users.

Music

Gaming

Developing markets

  • 39.8 million Tanzanians have a mobile connection – The number of phone subscribers in Tanzania rose by 25 per cent in 2015 to 39.8 million, said the country’s industry regulator. It also confirmed that the number of Internet users rose 52 per cent to 17.26 million last year from 2014.
  • 14.3 per cent of Brazil’s e-commerce is mobile – Mobile commerce in Brazil went up by 47 per cent in 2015, according to research from consulting firm E-bit. The rise meant that m-commerce now accounts for 14.3 per cent of online shopping, up from 9.7 per cent in 2014.
  • India will have 371 million mobile internet users by June – The tumbling cost of mobile data is set to increase India’s mobile internet population by nearly 70m in six months. A new report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) says the connected base will hit 371 million by June.

Trust and Security

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