On February 28, 2013, India (as part of its 2013-2014 budget) announced that it would increase the excise duty on mobile phones costing more than $36 to 6%, up from the current level of 1%. Forrester believes that this increase will not affect the mobile industry in India very much because:

• Sub-$100 smartphones will trigger new kinds of competition in the market. As high-end mobile phones get more expensive, Forrester predicts that smartphones costing less than $100 will be in much greater demand. Moreover, handset manufacturers will absorb a large portion of the price increase to sustain their sales.
• Explosive mobile Internet growth. With increasing urbanization and improving per capita income, more people will begin to use the Internet, and the use of smartphones will rise quickly. We forecast that the mobile Internet user base in India will grow by more than 30% year-on-year over the next five years.
• Addicted social media youngsters. With more than 61 million Facebook users, India ranks as Facebook’s third-largest audience in the world after the US and Brazil. Half of these users are between 18 and 24 years of age, and the majority of them use their mobile phones to connect to the world.
• Rapid eCommerce growth complementing the mobile sector. Forrester estimates that eCommerce revenues in India will increase more than fivefold by 2016, jumping from US$1.6 billion in 2012 to US$8.8 billion in 2016. Mobile-friendly sites from various players and eCommerce website aggregators will help accelerate mobile Internet adoption.

With just over a billion people around the world having a smartphone in 2012, and the next billion smartphone adopters joining in within the next five years, smartphones have reached a tipping point. Malcolm Gladwell defines the tipping point as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” within a sociological ecosystem. A technology hits critical mass when one-fifth of the population adopts it. For smartphones, developed economies witnessed this phenomenon in 2011.

North America and Europe top the global smartphone penetration rates, at 47% and 35%, respectively. However, they are outpaced in terms of the sheer number of users by the Asia Pacific region. In fact, China alone already has more smartphone users than any other country in the world. And our forecast shows that Asia Pacific is also the fastest-growing region for smartphone adoption, projected to increase by approximately 20% per year.

In the Forrester Research World Smartphone Forecast 2012 To 2017 (Global), we investigate the size, speed, operating system (OS) dominance, and user demographics of the competitors in the world’s smartphone showdown. Younger and wealthier adults are the early adopters of smartphones, but there will be a gradual progression toward adoption by lower-income and older adults as smartphones become cheaper and the offerings of basic phones become more limited.  

No, not cars that move quickly — cars that move data quickly via fast built-in connections. Today, GM announced that most of its US and Canadian 2015 model year Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC vehicles would come equipped with built-in LTE connections — supplied by AT&T — powering a range of OnStar safety, security, diagnostic, and infotainment services. No surprise in cars getting LTE or in GM's leadership — the next logical step in the connected car chain that started with GM's launch of OnStar in 1996. More noteworthy are:

• AT&T winning GM's business. Verizon Wireless powers the existing OnStar service, and, considering how vital coverage is to OnStar's safety and security services, Verizon's superior LTE coverage (273.5 million people versus 170 million for AT&T today) would seem to make it a logical choice for GM. Apparently GM was convinced by AT&T's public commitment to cover 300 million US consumers by year end 2014 — in addition to the ability to use the same technology globally and the superior performance of AT&T's network when LTE is unavailable. 

Data from Forrester’s Forrsights Budgets and Priorities Tracker Survey, Q4 2012 highlights that a total of 53% of IT organizations interviewed in India plan to increase their software spending on mobile applications in 2013. Among all the countries, India ranks second only after Australia/New Zealand and considerably higher than the regional average:

It’s encouraging to see Indian CIOs start to give a high priority to mobility software spending, but our research shows that the majority of mobile application initiatives are skewed toward employees and BYOT (and, to some extent, partners) with little focus on mobile customer engagement. Forrester research findings indicate that mobile applications will be a more critical channel to reach consumer markets in Asia Pacific in the future compared to more developed western markets.  This is especially true in India, where the population is younger (according to the UN, 27% of the population is between the ages of 15 and 29), the mobile Internet user base is growing at the rate of more than 30% annually, and sub-$100 smartphones are further fueling mobile Internet growth.

What It Means For CIOs:

• Put customers at the center of your mobile strategy. If you’re not establishing the architectures and capabilities to reach these mobile customers now, you won’t be positioned for success three years from now. CIOs have an opportunity to lead their organizations by leveraging technology in strengthening customer relationships.