Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2012 smartphone sales will be more than 450 million units, surpassing PC and laptop sales. Mary Meeker called “Queen of the Net” by Barron’s during the run up to the dot-bomb, made the prediction during her “State of the Internet” presentation (PDF) at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The Washington Post reports that Ms. Meeker further projected that by 2013, smart phone sales will approach 650 million units. Meeker spoke about growth in the smartphone market and its link to social networking sites, as well as about Internet video and advertising.
Ms. Meeker, says to watch out for mobile growth in China. The rehabilitated dot-bomb cheerleader says that China’s population of smartphone users is relatively nascent, with 14.5 million 3G users, or two percent of the population. That compares with 37 million in the United States. But that population grew by 941 percent in the third quarter compared with one year ago.
Techcrunch points out that Ms. Meeker’s predictions are reasonable. Smartphones are cheaper and phones, in general, are more ubiquitous. To the extent that all phones are becoming smartphones, they will be much more accessible and portable and than PCs (laptops included). They are certainly becoming just as capable, at least as far as surfing the Web is concerned, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of apps available for platforms like the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, Google (GOOG) Android, and Research In Motion’s (RIMM) Blackberry.
Related articles
- Mary Meeker: Other than the economy, things look pretty good (news.cnet.com)
- Mary Meeker: 81 Percent of Users of Top Web Sites Are Outside the U.S. (allthingsd.com)
