How big is the smartphone market? Try these numbers on for size: from 1997 to 2012, there were 1.038 billion smartphones in use, enough for 1 for for every 6.7 people on the planet. But (and here’s the real mind blower), while it took 16 years to get the first billion smartphones online, the next one billion smartphones will be sold in the next two years.
That’s one of many cool little factoids put together in an infographic published by NowSourcing on behalf of mobile developer Moovweb.
There’s a lot to take in here, but one of my favorite bits of info justifies a position that many in the media have been pounding on for quite some time: sometime in 2013, according to a graph from Morgan Stanley Research embedded in the infographic, the number of mobile Internet users is expected to surpass the number of desktop Internet users.
The days of the desktop user as the dominant Internet force are about to end.
That can translate into big dollars, too. In 2011, for instance, global mobile transactions totaled about $241 billion. By 2015, that figure is projected to jump to more than $1 trillion.
Clearly, Moovweb is making the argument that retailers had better get off their collective butts and get into this exploding marketplace. (The “52% of surveyed retailers do not yet have a mobile optimized website” is a bit of a giveaway on the booga-booga tactics.) Self-interest aside, they have a point: smartphones are the wallets of the future, and commercial organizations need to figure out a way to tap into this new source of revenue, fast.
Check out the rest of the infographic to see what stats jump out at you.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
