Moving beyond subscriber growth - Emerging opportunities as mobile adoption approaches saturation

GSMA Intelligence is today publishing a major report to coincide with the latest update to our unique subscriber data set, based on the results of our expanded and improved consumer survey for 2015.

GSMA Intelligence has found that over the last five years the mobile industry has connected an additional 1.4 billion people to mobile services for the first time. As a result, 63% of the global population now benefits from the economic opportunities that mobile connectivity brings. There are now 4.7 billion unique subscribers globally, using a total of 7.3 billion SIM connections (excluding M2M).

However, following rapid growth since 2010, subscriber growth is set to slow from 2016, with unique subscribers increasing by 1 billion by 2020. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 4.0%, down from 7.7% between 2010 and 2015. Many markets are now approaching a point of saturation; most economically developed markets have already surpassed 90% unique subscriber penetration, meaning the vast majority of the addressable population already subscribes to mobile services.

In these saturated markets operators must offset this slowing subscriber growth by continuing to develop new ways to capture the increasing value within the expanding mobile ecosystem, both by broadening their business models and by investing in new network technologies and services.

The consumer survey underpinning this latest unique subscriber update was conducted across 54 countries worldwide, representing 3.8 billion subscribers – or more than 80% of the global total. Our continuing investment in our primary research programme has enabled us to offer further unique insight into the real level of penetration in every cellular market in the world, measuring the true reach of the mobile industry.