Rising Economies Hit Web with Phones

• Posted: Wednesday, September 03, 2008
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• Author: pradhana
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• Filed under: Miscellaneous

Different ways of counting users yield different results.

Five of the world's 10 largest cities are located in the fast-growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (the so-called BRIC countries), along with four of the five top markets for new mobile subscribers.

Moreover, mobile is not simply viewed as an extension of the Web in BRIC, as it is in the US, Western Europe and parts of Asia-Pacific. Mobile is the Internet for an increasingly large and attractive consumer segment.

Less than 2% of mobile users in India accessed the Internet with their phone in Q1 2008, according to Nielsen Mobile's "Mobile Media Marketplace" report.

Nicholas Covey, director of insights at Nielsen Mobile, told eMarketer that its penetration rates could be viewed as low when compared with official counts relased by national regulatory agencies, because such agencies reported numbers of lines and did not account for subscribers who had multiple phones. Mr. Covey added that Nielsen's data was based on interviews of mobile users in major cities.

Indeed, eMarketer's own estimates are benchmarked against official national agency counts, which put Indian mobile Internet penetration at more than one-third of its mobile user population for 2008.

Read more - eMarketer

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