ASIA-PACIFIC MAKES UP HALF OF THE WORLD’S MOBILE SUBSCRIBER TOTAL: Non-western countries continue to grow their stronghold over the global mobile market. Asia-Pacific countries are especially dominant, with 1.7 billion unique mobile subscribers out of the 3.4 billion subscribers worldwide, according a report released from the GSM Association. These countries now represent more than half of global mobile users.

Leaving aside subscribers in China and India, though, the playing field looks to be a little more even. Ericsson released its own report on the mobile market and broke out China and India from its definition of Asia-Pacific. The report still showed Asia-Pacific to be the top region, with China in second, and India in fourth.

And this dominance extends beyond mobile in general, to smartphone usage as well. China and India will combine for over 400 million smartphone users this year, as we showed in a recent chart, and the region is already dominating by several smartphone usage metrics.

One example is in app revenue. We found that at the end of last year, the Asia-Pacific region generated the largest share of global app revenue at 41%, according to Distimo (see chart below). And that’s without accounting for app revenue in China. Throw China into that app revenue pool and Asia-Pacific may already have a stronghold on app revenue as well as subscribers.

Source: BI Intelligence Mobile Insider by Cale Gutherie Weissman