Global Mobile Facts and Figures - 2014

• According to ITU, by May 2014, there were nearly 7 Billion mobile subscribers Worldwide which is about 95.5 percent of the world population. 

• 14 countries in the world had surpassed the 100 million mobile subscriptions mark (by Nov 2013) which accounted for 61 percent of the world’s total mobile subscriptions. They are  - highest to lowest - China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria, Germany, Bangladesh, Philippines and Mexico. China had over 1200 million subscribers and together with India’s  900 million the two make up about 29 percent of the World’s total mobile subscriptions.  (Mobiforge)

• The developed world has over 1.5 billion mobile subscribers with a mobile penetration of 120.8 percent which has reached near saturation point with little room for growth. 

• The developing world has over 5.4 billion mobile subscriptions with a mobile penetration of 90.2 percent which is 78 percent of global subscriptions but still with room for growth

• Asia Pacific with 3.6 billion subscription accounts for more than half the world’s mobile subscriptions, thus 52.1 percent of the global number. (ITU)

• Africa may still have the lowest mobile penetration worldwide at 69.3 percent but Portio Research predicts that by 2016 Africa and Middle East will overtake Europe as the second largest region for mobile subscribers.  As an indication ITU’s figures show that while ‘all regions continue to show double-digit growth rates,  Africa stands out with a growth rate of over 40% – twice as high as the global average. By end 2014, mobile-broadband penetration in Africa will have reached almost 20%, up from less than 2% four years earlier.’

• USA now has 143 million Smartphones (not mobile phones) and 71 million tablets which has enabled mobile internet access and doubled the amount of time spent online by American’s since 2010. The leading platform for U.S Smartphone use are Android (53%) and iPhone (40%) with Blackberry down to 3%. According to iMedia Connection, Mobile ads perform 4-5 times better than online ads in the US and that would explain why marketers in the US spend $8.5 billion in 2013 on mobile advertising  double what they spend in 2012 ($4.4 billion) and why this figure is projected to quadruple to $31.1 billion by 2017. (Heidi Cohen)

• Germany is currently Europe’s largest mobile market and the eleventh largest telecoms market in the world.

• Brazil is the fifth largest telecoms Market in the world and one of the top countries for the use of social networks and popularity of Whatsapp messaging feature. 

• Sweden is a world-leading market in terms of mobile usage, mobile penetration and mobile smartphone penetration. Sweden saw the introduction of the world’s first 4G (fourth-generation) networks in 2009 and today the majority of Swedes are covered by a superfast 4G data network. At Cannes (the World’s major marketing/advertising awards), last year, Swedish companies picked up nine Mobile Lions, second only to the United States (which has a population 33 times larger than Sweden).

• Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation – is the largest mobile market in Africa and the tenth largest in the world. In 2013, Nigeria surpassed 100 million active mobile subscriptions, which equates to around 65.8 percent of the population joining the 100 million club. 

• Kenya is the world leader in mobile money being home to the world famous M-PESA by the country’s largest mobile operator Safaricom with over 19 million Kenyans using their cell phones as a mobile wallets or bank accounts. 

• Japan’s mobile market is said to be the world’s most sophisticated in terms of mobile Web, marketing and services and the most lucrative mobile app market in the world. According to statistics released by TCA in September 2013, Japan had over 134.8 million mobile subscribers, of whom 107.5 (79.7%) were mobile internet subscribers. Also unlike other markets, Japan’s standard messaging technology is mobile email, not SMS and MMS.

            Sources

1. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) - http://www.itu.int/en/
2.  Mobiforge - http://mobiforge.com/  
3. Portio Research - http://www.portioresearch.com 
4.   iMedia Connection  - http://www.imediaconnection.com/
5. TCA - http://www.tca.or.jp/english/database/index.html 
6. Statista - http://www.statista.com

Mobile Payments: The Next Big Thing

Apple Inc just unveiled its mobile payments application Apple Pay - expected to debut in the US this October.  Apple Pay uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology inbuilt within Apple’s latest iPhones and iWatches to allow the user to make payments for goods and services at retail stores.  The application joins a number of other already established mobile payment apps including Google’s Google Wallet, Softcard (Formerly ISIS) by T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, Square, PayPal , the list goes on. 
 

Mobile payments which is a convergence of two major industries - Commerce and Communication – is big business and will only grow bigger in years to come. According to research firm, Juniper (April 2014), global payments via mobile devices is expected to be US $507 billion in 2014, up 40 percent from 2013. Such statistics, are the reasons why major players in both industries - financial institutions, telecoms and mobile manufacturers – and beyond, are all positioning themselves to benefit from the increase in adoption of mobile payment technology.

 

Mobile payments simply defined are “Payments for products or services between two parties for which a mobile device plays a major role in the realization of the payment” (Atos Origin).  A mobile device has to play some part in the whole payment scenario for it to qualify as mobile payment.  There are two main types of mobile payments which are (1) Remote and (2) Proximity 

Remote Mobile Payments, widely used in Kenya, cover payments that take place online with the mobile phone used to authenticate personal information stored remotely.  In this case, in a transaction scenario the buyer can be anywhere and the transaction still take place, so long as the necessary funds are transferred from the buyers account to the sellers account. 

Remote mobile payments typically rely on text messaging, a mobile app or a mobile browser. Safaricom’s Mpesa and Airtel’s Airtel Money which allow subscribers to shop, pay bills, transfer funds, top up prepaid accounts using their phones  are some of the examples of Remote mobile payment. Airtime deduction for micro transactions like logos, ringtones and music purchases are also a form of remote mobile payments. 

Proximity mobile payments refer to contactless payments where a mobile phone equipped with contactless technology such as Near Field Communication (NFC) interacts with a physical POS device to allow the transfer of a buyer’s payment information and complete a transaction.  Proximity mobile payments can also be achieved by the use of bar codes where a 2 dimensional (2D) bar code displayed on a smartphones screen is read by an optical scanner at the POS or the phones camera is used as an optical scanner to read a bar code displayed on a POS terminal.

Prerequisite to proximity mobile payments using NFC is that both the buyer’s phone and the seller’s check-out counter need to be NFC enabled, and that is where the limitations come in. Handset manufacturers have been releasing NFC enabled device into the market since 2011, but it’s taken a while for retailers and organizations to adopt the technology and start accepting contactless payments.  

Some countries and organizations have already deployed NFC mobile contactless applications in such places as public transportation, parking bays and events.  For examples, In the US, the state of San Francisco uses NFC for their parking meters and Japan became the first to launch the first commercial service worldwide that enables passengers to use NFC phones as boarding passes for Japan Airlines.  

In Kenya, NFC is also gaining ground, in fact this morning I had a very interesting conversation with my client Njoroge Thairu who has been utilizing this technology to shift between profiles on his phone as he moves from place to place. When he purchased his smartphone, a Huawei P7, he noticed that it said that the phone was NFC-enabled; being a curious fellow he decided to inquire about it then to put it to the test.

With the NFC tags provided with the phone, he put one in the car and another at his office. Now immediately he gets into his car, he just taps the phone to the tag and the profile changes to hands free where he can answer calls via Bluetooth, in his office it changes to ‘meeting’ profile.  

Marvelous isn’t it? Now if only he could use the same for mobile payments, at the ATM, Supermarket, parking lot, Laundromat…it sure will help cut down on all the cards (credit, debit, loyalty, ID) that bulk up his leather wallet and attract the wrong attention from suspicious characters.  Strategy Analytics in October 2013 predicted that by 2017, there will be 115 Million NFC handset owners spending just over $48 billion using their NFC phones. I do believe that by then Kenya will have fully caught up with the rest of the world and all you will need to get your weekly shopping done, will be your shopping list and a Smartphone.  

Article by Shiyayo Makatiani, Corporate Technologies (K) Ltd

Twitter: @CPTECHKenya

Email: info@cptech.co.ke

Website: www.cptech.co.ke

GSMA Report: Digital Entrepreneurship in Kenya 2014

GSMA working with iHub_Research, the UK Government and OMIDYAR Network recently released a report dubbed Digital Entrepreneurship in Kenya 2014. The report looks at the current evolving trends within the mobile industry in the developing world with a narrower focus on Kenya’s emerging digital entrepreneurship ecosystem.  It also looks at the various opportunities available for digital entrepreneurship, as well as the challenges startups in the sector are facing.

You can read the report at:   http://www.gsmaentrepreneurshipkenya.com/ 

OR  Download PDF

INTERNET OF THINGS: A Whole New Level of Hyperconnectivity

Imagine a scenario where your dog sends you an SMS telling you he is taking a walk around the block, your fridge updates your shopping list with the items that have run out on its shelves, your TV refuses to switch on because you have not done your exercise for the day and you get in your car and instead of driving you sit back and let it drive you to your office while it reads you today’s paper.  Reality or fiction?
 

Welcome to the world of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), a concept that envisions a world where ordinary everyday objects are connected and networked to the internet and/or to one another and can freely communicate and upload data with little or no human interaction. The ‘things’ in the IoT in this case can refer to an endless array of objects including household appliances (fridges, microwaves), medical gadgets (pacemakers, heart monitors), wearable devices (Smart watches and glasses), automobile engines, factory machines, and even farm animals, the list is endless. The basic criterion is that if the ‘thing’ can be switched on and off and/or has a sensor embedded in it then it can be part of the IoT. 

The way it works is to have every ‘thing’ (thing here also includes people) issued with an IP address as a unique identifier, giving it autonomy on the internet and limiting or completely removing the human factor in data capturing. With IoT, the internet platform shifts in to a totally new paradigm in its ability to gather, analyze, and distribute data that can then be turned into actionable information.

Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) in a white paper released in 2011 put the number of devices connected to the internet by 2010 at 12.5 billion; the same report predicted that “there will be 25 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020.” Analyst firm Gartner was a bit more conservative putting the number at 26 billion, by 2020. These figures are a great indicator of the high impact that IoT is expected to have in the various aspects of everyday-life for private users as well as for businesses.

For Individual users the impact will be in such areas like health, education and communication. In health, IoT will make remote monitoring of gadgets like heart monitors and pacemakers a possibility as well as enable emergency notifications especially for the terminally ill and the elderly. For businesses, IoT will give the ability to more efficiently monitor and control operations while providing more information and control in order to identify and fix these problems.

Along with the innumerable opportunities and connections created by IoT, come a myriad of challenges the major one being security – hacking, crime and terrorism. With everything being networked to everything else, it makes it very easy for someone who manages to hack into just one device on the network to gain access to your entire network. From there the industrial spy, the stalker, the terrorist, gains free reign and power over the victim. 

It is however important to note that in the case of IoT where the benefits may very well outweigh the challenges, then it is worth taking the risk even as the relevant regulatory bodies embark on finding ways of minimizing the risks and plugging any vulnerabilities.