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One Internet - 2 mobile worlds

robin.jewsbury | 05 May, 2008 13:35

 

I've been looking at the Morgan Standley Internet Trends report.  Its an excellent report which charters the growth of the fixed and mobile Internets.  One thing that has interested me for some time is that I've noticed that there are two worlds for the Mobile Internet and I wondered if this report could shed light on my thoughts.  I'll call the two worlds, the Old World and the New World.  I plotted the above graph (explained below) and was disappointed as it was not as clear cut as I expected but all is explained below.

Old World

The Old World consists of the established fixed Internet countries where the consumer discovered the Internet via a PC.  These people have subsequently also bought Mobile phones are increasingly discovering the mobile Internet through on the phone.

New World

The New World, mainly consisting of the emerging economies, has a population who are discovering the Internet firstly by Mobile phone. With perhaps only the technical elite in these countries using the fixed Internet.

Discussion 

Now my observation has been that those in the New World are engaging with the Mobile Internet much faster than the those for the Old World.  The reason is perhaps that there is a greater expectation and disappointment from those moving from the fixed internet to the mobile internet.  Looking at the Morgan Stanley figures, I wondered if I could show the grouping of countries on a graph.  The reports shows the top 15 fixed and mobile Internet countries.  I worked out the ratio of of users on Mobile/Fixed Internet.  I also included the rate of change of the ratio for each country and this is shown by an up or down arrow before the country name in the graph above.  The groupings are there but its not as clear cut as I had hoped.  The problem is that the Mobile phone penetration rate for a country does not represent the Mobile Internet engagement by users.  For example in Italy the penetration is 133% because of the intense interest in having the status symbol of a phone, but the interest in Mobile Internet has not matched this interest - another way to look at it is that because there is only one person and one internet viewer for very 1.33 phones so immediately the ratio becomes unrealistic.  So I then looked at our own data for our EyeMags service.  The reason for choosing EyeMags over Mippin (our main service) is that EyeMags has had 100% organic growth (absolutely no marketing had been done for it so there should be no real country weighting other than that the UI is in English). 

So here Indonesia and India do indeed come out significantly ahead of UK and US.  However, other new world countries such as China, Russia and Brazil, do not show up significantly so again the analysis is disappointing.  My conclusion now was there is a 3rd effect going on - that is maturity of the the Mobile Internet.  In China, Russia and Brazil the potential is huge but the maturity of the Mobile Internet is low.

Conclusion

This is a complicated area.  There are undoubtedly two mobile internet worlds and levels of maturity play significant role currently.

 

 

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