Everybody Wants a Cell Phone!

Despite rising gas prices, a global financial crisis, increasing unemployment rates, and numerous reports proclaiming that they cause cancer, cell phones remain as popular as ever, and the mobile phone industry is even expected to boom in the next five years! According to ZDNet, although average revenue per user is expected to decline, the number of users will rise.

The reason? Growth in emerging markets for cell phones is astounding. An analysis conducted by Portio Research predicted that the percentage of the world’s population that  uses of mobile-phones will increase to 80% in 2013 from the current 50% now, which amounts to 5.8 billion people. The expected number of cell phone users is expected to reach 4 billion this year alone!

The report stated, “The mobile industry continues to confound expectations with spectacular accelerating growth,” which attributed the growth mainly to China and India’s markets. Between the two, they are expected to contribute one billion additional mobile phone subscribers in the next five years. Additionally, Brazil is expected to add 132 million more subscribers.

So why does everyone want a cell phone? It could be the old saying, “Because everyone else has one, I need one too!” It could be that cell phones are one of the most convenient pieces of technology and their use is rather facile. Whatever the reason, it appears that cell phones seem to transcend normal stipulations of product elasticity. As things get worse economically, people buy more of them.

The ramifications on the technological world are huge. With such a boom in the industry, a greater demand for technological innovations in cell phones is in full swing. Recently, Apple has created its own cell phone, the iPhone, and even more recently, the release of  Google’s Android just show how tech giants that do not primarily deal with cell phones have begun expanding their boundaries to include the creation of cell phones. Will Microsoft’s oPhone be the next big cell phone craze? It's all on the whims of cell phone users.

What we can be sure of is that as long as the cellular phone industry continues to grow at its projected rate, mobile users will continue to enjoy the latest and greatest concepts and innovations from tech firms everywhere, each trying to snag a majority share of the growing market.