Quarterly World Review: Q4 2008

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