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Companies Will Be Able To Reach A Billion Smartphone Customers By 2013

The number of smartphone users by the year 2013 looks like it will have the ability to reach and top 1 billion users. The number of consumer’s worldwide using smartphones last year (2009) was 102 million and it will grow to be almost 974 million by the time the year 2013 comes around. This is according to a research group research2guidance.
What this new report focuses on is the corporate perspective in terms of application publishing for smartphone devices. Currently there are only 10% of the Fortune 2000 companies that are using smartphone applications to target their customer base.
Ralf Gordon Jahns, who is the Research Director for the research2guidance research group was able to provide some insight into smartphone usage. Jahns talked about that despite all of the hype that surrounds the phones like the iPhone as well as the other cutting edge devices that are out on the market that corporations are only just now starting to notice that smartphone applications can offer a direct route to channel in their customer base.
When it came time for a publishing platform for their first application basically all of what are considered the first mover companies decided to go with the Apple Application Store for this choice. Now that the years are going further we get to 2010 and the number of application stores are starting to explode any application publisher will now have to more carefully choose where they are promoting their applications.
Ralf-Gordon Jahns had the following to talk say in order to shed a little light. “Our App Store Ranking shows that there are other apps stores besides the Apple App Store that offer good publishing opportunities in 2010.”He went onto say that, “Especially independent stores like Handango or Mobihand scored high in our rankings.” Basically said competition is prospering and publishers have more and more options and now have some thought to put into decisions.
When it comes to the immense bulk of the early corporate adopters they had published their applications in order to give access to their core products. That equated to right about 91% using this for promotional purposes. The other 9%, which is a much more minor share, used the applications simply as a standalone product.
The market for application downloads is poised to explode. To put the growth into perspective in 2009 the application market was right about $1.94 billion USD. By the time 2013 comes around it is going to skyrocket from that $1.94 billion USD all the way up to $15.65 billion USD. Companies are going to begin to start focusing more on application business models. These business models are going to offer additional opportunities for revenue which would account for the monetary growth explosion.
In order to be successful within the dynamic application market the corporate publishers are going to have to use leverage with their internal asset. This is how they’ll have to work to effectively compete with the mass influx of specialized developers. These things are going to include the already existing market channels, infrastructure ads well as the service platforms. This will work to give them a key advantage over the mobile specialists. The one thing to know for sure is that when competition runs rampant the consumer wins.

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Tags: apps, Cell Phones, iphone

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 3:07 pm by Matt Heman and is filed under Cell Phone Applications, Cell Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Companies Will Be Able To Reach A Billion Smartphone Customers By 2013”

Marketers eye smartphone apps | Marketing and New Media Says:
March 30th, 2010 at 5:50 am
[...] way to reach new and existing customers. One study suggested that companies will be able to reach 1 billion smartphone customers by [...]