Quarterly World Review: Q4 2008
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The GSMA Intelligence Quarterly World Review is now available for download for fourth quarter 2008:
In Q4 2008, the worldwide cellular market reached 4 billion connections. It took only 6 quarters to add one billion connections globally, with most of the growth coming from emerging markets. On a quarterly basis, worldwide cellular connections grew by 4% and market penetration reached 60%. The prepaid market has increased by 5% sequentially in Q4 2008 to represent 72% of total connections. The contract market grew by 10% on a yearly basis. In terms of the technology split, 81% of the World cellular connections are GSM, 10% are CDMA and 7.8% are WCDMA (including WCDMA HSPA), and the remainder are iDEN, PDC and TDMA. The GSM installed base has increased by 4.2% between Q3 and Q4 2008, CDMA declined by 0.85% and WCDMA grew by just below 10%.
Africa has seen its cellular connections grow by 35% during 2008 which makes it the fastest growing region in the World. It is followed by Middle East with 27% yearly growth and Asia Pacific with 25%. Europe and USA/Canada were the slowest growing cellular markets with an average of 1.3% on a quarterly basis for Western Europe and USA/Canada and 3.7% in Eastern Europe.
In 2007, 26 operators globally reported a yearly decline in cellular connections, with the vast majority of them located in Europe. This yearly decline totalled just under 14.6 million connections. In 2008, 29 operators have reported a decline, also mainly located in Europe, coming to 44.3 million cellular connections. Looking year-on-year, it is important to note that this negative trend is not primarily due to the global economic downturn but caused by:
- strong competitive pressure in mature markets
- the effect of new regulations such as mobile number portability
- data clean-up: operators restating the installed base of registered SIMs to reflect active users
The review covers all regions (Africa, Americas, Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Middle East and USA & Canada) with a three-page analysis on each including:
- The latest aggregated data tables
- Topical discussion on an operator-, group- and market-level basis
- Key trends, market drivers and challenges for each region
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Quarterly World Review: Q4 2008
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Quarterly World Review: Q4 2008
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By submitting this form, you agree that your email address and related activity on the platform will be processed for the purpose of generating and providing the requested report. Your data will be shared with GSMA Intelligence for this purpose. For more information, please see the GSMA Intelligence Privacy Policy.
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