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Asia Pacific in Q2 2007: The Dominance of China and India
China dominates the Asia Pacific mobile market, with more than two in every five mobile subscribers in the entire region living in the world's largest country. However, China's contribution to the continental total has declined now for 13 successive quarters, from a high of 48.0% at the end of March 2004, to just 40.6% at the end of Q2 2007.
During that time the world's second largest country and third largest mobile market by connections, India, has more than taken up this slack. A total of 55.45% of Asia Pacific's mobile customers now come from one or other of the two countries, versus 53.85% 13 quarters ago, implying that India has increased its share of the Asia Pacific total from 5.9% to 14.8%.
In terms of the global customer base, India accounted for just under 6% at the end of Q2 2007, up from 4.4% a year earlier, whereas China's contribution declined from 16.9% to 16.2%. At the end of June 2007, almost exactly one in five of the world's population was Chinese, so we would expect China's contribution as far as mobile customers are concerned to pick up eventually - although for the moment the market's progress remains distinctly "un-dynamic" and there is little immediate prospect of a turn-around. India, on the other hand, contributes 16.8% of the world's total population, and, unlike China, we would expect its share of the world mobile market to continue to tend towards that figure, at least for the foreseeable future.
The contrasting performances of Asia Pacific's two largest markets are starkly evident in their annual customer growth rates for the year to 30th June 2007. In India, the number of customers increased by more than two thirds between June 2006 and June 2007 to 177m, going on to break the 200m barrier during September (with the help of a reclassification of customers conducted by CDMA player TATA Teleservices in July). China added more customers than India during the year to 30th June 2007, with 75.3m to India's 71.0m, but the larger size of the existing market in China meant that proportionate growth amounted to just 18.4% in the year as customer numbers climbed to 483.9m at the end of June, subsequently going on to break the 500m barrier in early September.
Posted to the site on 11th October 2007
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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