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APAC smartphone market to skyrocket
Tue, 24th Aug 2010
FYI, this story is more than a year old

According to a survey by Frost & Sullivan, growth in the Asia-Pacific smartphone market is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. The research firm has forecast that by 2015, 54% of all devices sold in the region will be smartphones, up from 5% in 2009.

In both Australia and New Zealand, Frost & Sullivan believes that 62% of all devices sold with be smartphones by 2015, up from 2% in 2009.

“Smartphones are critical to every operator’s mobile broadband business case, as a smartphone user’s ARPU (average revenue per user) typically increased by 25 to 100% after adoption depending on the market,” said Frost & Sullivan Industry Manager Marc Einstein.

“The Asia-Pacific market is particularly interesting for smartphones as there has been significant uptake in emerging markets like China, India and Indonesia, even among prepaid users,” he adds.

Incremental data usage from smartphones is expected to generate over US$38 billion for operators in the Asia-Pacific region (which covers 18 Asia-Pac countries, including Japan), up from US$1.3 last year.

Einstein says, however, that there are still many factors impeding sales of smartphone devices. “80% of Asian mobile users use prepaid cards, and in fact in many markets are as high as 97%, making smartphone subsidies impossible for most users. Furthermore, there is a lack of public Wi-Fi, particularly in emerging markets which has been a smartphone saviour in the USA and other developed markets.”

He also estimates 477 million units of smartphones will be sold in Asia-Pacific in 2015. “Only the most developing markets are seeing double-digit increases in device sales, and with flat or negative growth in many markets, smartphone sales are filling in this gap.”