A new study conducted in the United Kingdom has shown that the smartphone shopping trend is expanding rapidly.
Mobile commerce is rapidly making its mark on the world and the results of the latest study conducted in the United Kingdom have suggested that if companies fail to accept this fact and keep up with the demands of technology, they could rapidly be left behind by their competition.
The popularity of smartphones has made this channel available and used by a very rapidly growing consumer base.
Gartner research has now shown that the sale of tablets reached almost 120 million last, which was a doubling of the sales that were experienced the year before. In fact, last year, the number of smartphones on the planet broke the one billion mark, meaning that there is currently at least one of these devices for every seven people in the world, generating a phenomenally large mobile commerce market.
Though it did take almost twenty hears for smartphones to reach that level, mobile commerce is catching on faster.
It has been estimated that by the year 2015, the number of smartphones will have doubled, breaking the two billion mark, showing that the sale of these devices has increased exponentially in recent years. This growth has been primarily fueled by the popularity of smartphones within developing countries such as India, China, and several throughout Africa. It is in these regions that mobile commerce and other related sectors such as smartphone payments have been taking off at the most explosive rates.
That said, in the United Kingdom, data from Ofcom says that the smartphone penetration is at around half and that tablets have reached 19 percent of the population. This doesn’t represent quite as large of a mobile commerce market as in the developing nations, but it should be kept in mind that it is still experiencing tremendous growth. Further data shows that 81 percent of smartphone owners make at least one daily phone call. This is notable, considering that only 53 percent of landline users say that they make a phone call at least once every day.
