1 Billion Subs next month with $34 ARPU Mobile Outlook What? Q4 2001 Subscribers 940,979,000 Prepaid subscribers 392,355,000 Largest market: China 149,134,000 World ARPU $34.00 SMS per GSM sub 40 per month ===== EMC's Data Auditing & Forecasting Teams say: 1 Billion Mobile Phone Users Worldwide - In April According to the latest figures from EMC, providers of the most thoroughly researched, reliable and consistent global cellular subscriber data in the industry, the world's 1 billionth cellular subscriber* will sign up for service in the first week of April 2002. The 1 billion figure will have been reached some 23 years after NTT DoCoMo launched the first cellular system in 1979. The 1 billion total is heavily dominated by the GSM standard, accounting for over 67% (at Q4 2001) of the total. Third generation or '3G' networks account for very little (5 million+ subscribers) of the total. The vast majority of these users are on the cdma2000 1x networks in Korea. A sign of the recent pace of growth in the number of users is demonstrated by the time taken for the second 500 million total to be reached. The 500 million mark was passed in February 2000, with the second 500 million only taking a further 25 months - when subscribers signed up at the spectacular rate of more than 450 per minute! Whilst subscriber additions have slowed in many European markets, EMC sees the emergence of China and other developing markets as the driver for future growth. EMC's World Cellular Forecasts show the two billion mark being passed in 2005, with the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions driving the growth. While growth in SMS or text messaging has been phenomenal - the much heralded mobile internet is used by barely 5% of the subscriber base. * The terms subscriber and subscription are often used interchangeably. The industry often refers to the number of subscribers signed up for a cellular service, which is often interpreted as how many people are signed up with an operator, whereas EMC assumes this to refer to how many subscriptions are in existence, i.e. traffic and revenue generating accounts. Multi-subscription scenarios are already in existence whereby subscribers have more than one subscription for purposes of tariff arbitrage or distinguishing between personal and business subscriptions. Outside of multi-subscriptions, the recording of 'subscribers' (i.e. active subscriptions reported by operators) will begin to include considerable numbers of new devices containing cellular modules each generating traffic and in turn revenue for the operator.