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Report: 484,000,000 New Cell Phone Connections in Last 12 Months

Authored by Jay Baage on September 8, 2006 - 4:41am.
Cell Phone Connections IIThe mobile phone industry is still in an amazing growth phase. According to fresh estimates from Mobile Intelligence, the number of global mobile phone connections hit 2.5 billion on Thursday. That means that almost a half billion new connections were added just in the last 12 months! The growth is expected to be almost as rapid going forward, which means that we will reach 3 billion connections around the end of 2007.

These fresh estimates come from Wireless Intelligence, an organization set up by the research firm Ovum and the GSM Association.

The top 10 countries for volume of new connections over the last year were China, India, Russia, USA, Pakistan, Ukraine, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Between them, they account for over half of the growth in the world mobile market over the last 12 months.

"The cellular industry took 20 years to reach 1 billion connections, three years to reach 2 billion connections and is on target to reach its third billion in a period of just over two years," said Martin Garner, who is the Director of Wireless Intelligence. "Worldwide growth is currently running at over 40 million new connections per month - the highest volume of growth the market has ever seen," he added.

A quarter of the growth so far this year is coming from China and India. According to Wireless Intelligence, China's market is still expanding at more than 5 million new connections per month. India has seen the rate of new connections quadruple over the last 18 months, to reach a level very close to China's.

It should be noted that the total number of connections differs from the actual number of mobile users. This is because some individuals own a number of handsets, while others have mobiles that are inactive but may still be registered on operators' databases.

Cell Phone Connections II  
Cell Phone Connections Graph I  

tags: Mobile | Marketing | Tech | Wireless | Reports | Metrics | International | Cellphones |



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