Posted by Scott Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer

The full Australian-financial-year reporting season is over and I have trawled through the annual reports and press announcements (where available) to put together the following breakdown of the state of the mobile market.

So how big is the Australian Mobile market? Approximately 20.3 million subscribers.

The Australian mobile market by carrier

Telstra is streets ahead with approximately 42% of the total market share, followed by Optus with approximately 32%.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics population clock estimates there are 21,054,836 of us Aussies at the time of writing. The last census indicated that less than 20% of the population is children 15 years or younger. So the end result is that there are nearly 1.2 handsets for every adult Australian (over 15yrs).

The really interesting number for mobile Internet access is the 3G market size. My best estimate is that there are approximately 4.5 million 3G subscribers. In past quarters Hutchison has been the clear leader due to its early development of a 3G service and single-minded focus on this network. In the past quarter, the Telstra marketing machine has caught up and passed it. Telstra is now the leading network in terms of 3G subscribers.

The Australian 3G market by carrier

This is good news for marketers looking to explore the mobile Internet and the advanced marketing applications that it can provide, as approximately 22% of the market can now receive 3G content. We know many more 2G handsets are WAP-capable so this is really a scale opportunity for marketing. For me this is the tipping point where the opportunity for marketing is really interesting!

Tags: Australia, mobile industry, mobile marketing, mobile services

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.