With over 2.4 billion active users and growing steadily, the world wide mobile phone usage has surpassed PC usage. China is the world’s largest mobile phone market with over 600 million subscribers and India is the fastest growing mobile market with 400 million subscribers. China and India (CHINDIA) put together account for over 40% of all active mobile users in the world.
Due to economies of scale and mushrooming of ODM facilities in India and China, major mobile phone manufacturers have been able to drive the price of handsets down periodically over the years. Disruptive innovations in embedded processor technology coupled with exponential growth in firmware / software has resulted in the availability of low cost high functionality smart phones ( Better functionality with lower cost will be the trend in smart phones over the next couple of years ).
Local mobile search players have already understood the power of the CHINDIA mobile market and its impact in the coming years. asklaila, guruji mobile and yulop in India ; minfo and baidu mobile in China have already begun to tap the potential of the local markets through localized mobile search platforms. Both India and China are investing heavily in 3G infrastructure and wimax across the country, this means faster data rates and quick downloading and sharing of multimedia content for the subscribers.
Baidu has tied up with mobile service provider china mobile (the largest provider in china) to offer mobile search services to its subscribers. Asklaila has tied up with Airtel, India’s largest cell phone provider to deliver mobile search services to its subscribers in India.
New disruptive technologies in Near field communication and hyperlocal search will enable the evolution of disruptive business models in the mobile search arena. A recent research report predicts that the US mobile search advertising market alone will account for 1.3 billion USD . With CHINDIA hosting double that amount of active mobile subscribers and a growth rate many hundred percent more than the growth rate of PC’s, the market potential for mobile search is tremendous and is about to explode in the coming years.
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