There is a very good reason why mobile average revenue per user is going to keep falling. Most of the future subscribers have low income. “Subscriber growth opportunities over the coming years will be focused on connecting mainly rural, low-income populations,” says GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the GSMA.
So subscriber growth will entail “affordable connectivity.” That means lower prices.
But other forces are at work, including market saturation, competition (between mobile operators and between mobile operators and app providers) and product substitution (over the top alternatives to carrier services). Also, the cost of each new generation of networks has been growing.
That trend has been clear in developed (European) and developing (India) markets for some time.
Of the world’s five billion accounts, 55 percent) are in the Asia Pacific region. China and India account for a large percentage of total accounts. China accounts for more than a billion of the world’s subscribers, while India accounts for 730 million.
The most highly penetrated region in the world is Europe, where 86 percent of people subscribe to a mobile service. Sub-Saharan Africa is the least penetrated region at 44 percent.
It is forecast that the number of unique mobile subscribers worldwide will increase to 5.7 billion by the end of the decade.
By that point, almost three-quarters of the world’s population will subscribe to a mobile service. India is expected to account for the largest share of growth over this period, responsible for around 30 per cent of new unique subscribers by 2020.
Region
|
Unique mobile subscribers (millions)
|
% of global subscriber base
|
Subscriber penetration (% of population)
|
Asia Pacific
|
2,765
|
55%
|
68%
|
|
1,081
|
21%
|
78%
|
|
730
|
14%
|
54%
|
Europe
|
465
|
9%
|
86%
|
Latin America
|
459
|
9%
|
71%
|
Sub-Sahara Africa
|
436
|
9%
|
44%
|
Middle East & North Africa
|
391
|
8%
|
63%
|
North America
|
292
|
6%
|
80%
|
CIS
|
227
|
5%
|
79%
|
TOTAL:
|
5,035
|
100%
|
67%
|
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