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Sunday 27 September 2009
Mobile marvels

In 2000 the developing countries accounted for around one-quarter of the world’s 700m or so mobile phones. By the beginning of 2009 their share had grown to three-quarters of a total which by then had risen to over 4 billion (see chart 1). That does not mean that 4 billion people now have mobile phones, because many in both rich and poor countries own several handsets or subscriber-identity module (SIM) cards, the tiny chips that identify a subscriber to a mobile network. Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chief executive of Ericsson, the world’s largest maker of telecoms-network gear, reckons that the actual number of people with mobile phones is closer to 3.6 billion.

But exact numbers are hard to come by, not least because of the continued rapid growth in the global number of subscribers. In the year to March 2009 an additional 128m signed up in India, 89m in China and 96m across Africa, according to TeleGeography, a telecoms consultancy. Numbers in Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil and Russia also grew rapidly (see chart 2). China is the world’s largest market for mobile telephony, with over 700m subscribers. India is adding the biggest number each month: 15.6m in March alone. And Africa is the region with the fastest rate of subscriber growth. With developed markets now saturated, the developing world’s rural poor will account for most of the growth in the coming years. The total will reach 6 billion by 2013, according to the GSMA, an industry group, with half of these new users in China and India alone.

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