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What Phones Were Out In 2012?

What is the worldwide total addressable market for smart phones today and what is it expected to be by 2012 and beyond?

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    According to Canalys, a research group that focuses on smartphones: The fourth quarter also saw the worldwide smart phone market continue to soar, with shipments of 101.2 million units representing year-on-year growth of 89%. The final quarter took shipments for the year to fractionally below 300 million units, with an annual growth rate of 80% over 2009. That's from: http://www.canalys.com/pr/2011/r2011013.html So if there were 300M units sold in 2010 and that was growth of 80% over 2009, that means about 165M units in 2009. That's nearly half a billion units in two years. If you're talking about total addressable market globally, that's going to change drastically over the next couple years. As the price of smartphones continues to drop, the addressable market will grow as a result. One of Google's key strategic initiatives this year is to get inexpensive Android handsets into emerging markets. If Google is driving down the price of smartphones, that addressable market will also grow more quickly because of the weight that Google can put behind things it wants to see happen. In the US roughly 1 in 3 mobile phone users are smartphone users. Granted it's a richer market than, say, China, but if you use the US as a base you can guesstimate. If you extrapolate that out to all mobile phone users worldwide, of which there's currently about 5 billion if I remember right, that means about 1.7 billion smartphone users globally... potentially.

Bryan Zirkel at Quora Visit the source

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Last year wrote a blog post on why they invested in Foursquare.  In the post he said: At a macro level, over 4.6B people have mobile phones and there are 1.7B people on the Internet. Already, over 200M people worldwide have smart phones and that number is headed north fast. Read the whole post here: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/06/29/why-andreessen-horowitz-invested-in-foursquare/ I'm sure this number has dramatically grown, but that should give you an idea of mobile market size.

Chris Combs

The addressable market for smart mobile devices is equal to the number of people that can afford it (i.e. the desirability like the cellphone will be ubiquitous.) In telecoms total affordability (device+service) is about 5% of annual income. At current price points of about $200 per unit and assuming device makes up one third of the annual cost, this incorporates all people with an income of $12,000 per annum or above. As unit and service costs drop the affordability universe will drop to $6,000 (about 4 years out) and $3,000 (about 8 years out.) Have not done the global study but in developed markets and the richer emerging markets this is 100%, in subsaharan africa and poorer markets this is between 20% and 40%. You can easily to the stats by continent.

Afam Edozie

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