Half The World Has A Mobile Phone

Informa Telecoms and Media has estimated that today “worldwide mobile penetration will hit 50 per cent – or around 3.3 billion subscriptions”. Obviously there is no way they can know for sure, and since some people have more than one subscription it means that less than half the global population actually has a mobile phone account, but it’s still an attention-grabbing figure. While there is still some difference in penetration between mature mobile phone markets and emerging ones, the big difference these days is in ARPU: “Kuwaiti operator MTC brings in the highest ARPU in the world at the equivalent of $71 per month. But it is followed closely by Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 UK operation with an ARPU of $70.55 and Qatar operator Q-Tel with $69. Japanese operator KDDI brings in $67.65 per user per month, while Hutchison’s Austrian operation records and ARPU of $66.84…But at the other end of the scale, Hutchison’s Sri Lankan operator only counts revenues of $2.83 per user per month, beaten narrowly by Bangladesh’s PBTL, which operates under the CityCell brand and has an ARPU of $2.98. Ukrainian operator Astelit counts user revenues of $3, as does Pakistan’s CMPak, while another Bangladeshi operator, Sheba Telecom, reports an ARPU of $3.1.” (release)