Check out Chetan’s latest report, US Mobile Market Update – Q3 2015. Some highlights below. More details are available at: http://chetansharma.com/connectedconsumer15.htm.
Handsets – As expected, (a) Smartphones continue to rule, with penetration in the US now at 78%! (b) On the opposite end, feature phones are becoming extinct.
Android vs. iOS: The fight for profit continues – Chetan’s report shows that Apple continues to dominate the market with 80% of the profit share, 40% of the revenue share, with only 14% of the unit share. This is in contrast to Android where its OEMs such as HTC, Sony, LG and Lenovo all lost money in their device business; if we don’t count Samsung, Android OEMs made around billion dollars (despite over $26 billion in revenues). Chetan attributes this to the difficulty in differentiating on an open platform, which I agree with.
Other – Annual household spent on Mobile data is approaching $1,000, with mobile data spend rising while landline voice has declined. In addition, cellular voice spend has also gone down. Complementing the fact above that feature phones are becoming extinct, US consumers will spend more on wearables than on feature phones in 2015. Other interesting pieces of info: number of connected devices per US household is now 5.3 with over 37% of the households in the 4-8 range, and almost 6% of the households have 15 or more connected devices.
So in summary, the US and the whole world continues its path to always connected — with the mobile device at the center of how information is retrieved and how we connect with others. The mobile device is the world’s most important social artifact, ever. Those (companies) that have not yet embraced digital and mobile, are today’s dinosaurs.
Related to this, see Fortune’s article To Grow, Mobile Operators Must Look Beyond Phones.
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