Strategy Analytics reported that in the third quarter of this year, the global smartphone market crossed the milestone of 1 billion active devices.
The approximate number of working smartphones currently reaches 1.038 billion. It took the market as much as 16 years to overcome this mark. Moreover, according to representatives of Strategy Analytics, the market will have the next billion in just 3 years. Considering that in the last year alone there were almost 300 million more smartphones in the world than in the past (there were 708 million in the third quarter of 2011), it’s easy to believe.
According to Neil Mawston, executive director of Strategy Analytics, there is only one person in the world who owns a smartphone for seven people, which means that the market has a lot to grow. “Smartphone penetration is still relatively low,” Neal writes. “Most people in the world still don’t have a smartphone. So the global market has huge opportunities for future growth, especially due to the emerging mobile device markets of China, India and Africa.”