MWC 2008: Billion mobile phones sold each year

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More than one billion mobile phone handsets were sold worldwide in 2007, the fastest annual growth in five years, new research has found.

The report, released to coincide with the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, said that around 160 million more phones were sold than the number in 2006.

This growth was being driven in emerging markets such as Asia and Africa, not least because European market penetration had reached 95 per cent, leading to slowing growth in many Western and Eastern European countries.

Global products, which were defined as mobile phones which were sold in more than 55 countries, only accounted for 25 per cent of the market, a big change from five years ago where global products accounted for 50 per cent. This showed that as technology had improved, there was a wider choice of phones being made and available as users developed their own tastes.

"The more mature markets have to widen their portfolio because consumers are becoming a lot savvier about what they want from a phone," said Aaron Rattue, business group director of telecoms at GfK, who produced the survey.

"That means very specialist products - we've already seen lots more different types of phones come to the market in 2007 than 2006. One of the big things that came out of Barcelona and MWC is about phones being easy to use. In the mature markets this is what the mobile phone companies are concentrating on," he added.

One of the future trends expected in 2008 and beyond was increased convergence of IT and consumer electronics into the mobile phone market: "It is clear that the world of IT and consumer electronics is coming to the telecom arena," Rattue said.

"Mobile phone companies such as Virgin, BT and Orange are doing stuff like selling laptops, mp3 players and mobile broadband due to increased wireless broadband use. Mobile phone sales are slowing [in Europe], so this is the market companies have to look at."

In developing countries the focus was more on cheap and basic voice and text activated phones rather than ones with the latest technology. However, Rattue said that it was definitely possible for IT and telecom convergence to happen in places such as Asia, Africa and the Arab countries once it looks profitable to operators, but that it would take time.

"It's a lot easier to get networks working in places such as China and India now because you've engineers and infrastructure builders who already know what went right and what went wrong because they've got the experience. They can also install the latest technology," said Rattue.

"I think the operators are watching and seeing the mature markets and waiting to see if they make any money out of the [new wireless networks] in the long term before copying the schemes and pushing it out," he added.

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