Numbers, Part Eleven: Mobile and Cellphones

More numbers,
and I was fascinated to see a presentation from O2, the UK mobile
service, the other day where they held up a few numbers that are fairly
staggering.  In the UK:

• 15% of people are dumped by a girl or boyfriend via an SMS text message;
• O2 sold their first iPhone at 6:02 on 6th November 2007 and the first iPhone call was made at ... 6:06!
• O2
  sold 200,000 iPhones in the first two months of retailing in the UK
  compared to four million iPhones sold worldwide in the six months from
  launch on 29 June 2007;
• 65 million SMS text messages were sent on New Years Eve 2007 by the O2 network alone; and
• the average person's mobile telephone has 30 unique numbers stored on it (of which one is probably the bank!).

This was followed by a few other amazing stats, courtesy of my friend Roy Vella: 

• there are three billion mobile telephone subscribers worldwide, 1.1 billion PC users and 1.8 billion credit card holders;
• 1,000 new mobile telephone connections are added every minute;
• 60% of subscribers are in developing countries, and 80% of new mobile  telephone subscribers are from developing countries; 
• there has been a 10% increase in mobile usage in the last year, resulting in a 1.2% rise in GDP;
• a 2.5% reduction in the cost of remittances results in a 60% rise in volume; and
• mobile payments users average 26% more transactions than card users (according to NTT DoCoMo's Edy studies in Japan).

There's loads more numbers in this area, with many banking estimates and discussions on Finextra.  For example:

• Celent estimates that 35% of Americans will use mobile banking by 2010;
• US mobile banking users will rise from 1.1 million in 2007 to more than 40 million by 2012, according to  TowerGroup;
• mobile
  banking users will rise from 7% of users in 2007 to 25% by the end of
  2009, with US users rising from 1.6 million in 2007 to 35 million by
  end of 2010, according to Aite Group;
• the number of users of mobile banking users in the US will reach 21.27  million by 2010, according to Frost &  Sullivan;
• the mobile payments market will rise from $77.6 million in 2007 to $11.5 billion in 2011, according  to a report from Juniper Research; whilst
• 53% of Americans have no interest in using mobile banking or commerce,  according to Harris Interactive.

Whatever.

I guess this quote demonstrates why the mobile is important to all of us financial services: "In
2007, there are 2 billion mobile phone users who do not have a bank
account, or regular internet access, or both. Their primary banking
service will be their mobile phone.”  The GSM Association