INDIAN SMARTPHONE USERS SPEND MORE TIME ON CONTENT THAN VOICE AND SMS

By: Farshad Family, Managing Director - Media, Nielsen & Kedar Sohoni, President, Informate Mobile Intelligence

15-25 year olds spend more than 3 hours per day on their Smartphones and 60% of this is on entertainment & browsing

Data usage for 3G users is almost 44% more than 2G users

A study by the newly formed strategic alliance between Nielsen and Informate for India’s first mobile insights throws up some interesting findings on Smartphone usage in the country. Leading the findings is the fact that India’s growing population of Smartphone users now spend more time on entertainment and internet based content than on voice calling and text messages.

This alliance between Nielsen and Informate has been created to harness the power of mobile insights and analytics for marketers and the telecom industry. The alliance combines Nielsen’s consumer and marketing expertise with Informate’s technology and domain expertise. The alliance will enable companies across segments like telecom, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), publishers, advertisers, content creators, content aggregators and application developers to better understand, and effectively reach their customers. In addition, the alliance will create custom panels and custom surveys to enable the integration of content and device usage information with demographic profiling information to lend deeper insight about these consumers.

Nielsen Informate Mobile Insights, as the alliance is called, revealed in its most recent study that the average Smartphone user spends 2 and a half hours a day using their phones with 72% of their time spent on activities such as gaming, entertainment, apps and internet related content. Only 28% of their time is now used for voice calls and text messaging.

As India’s mobile user base grows, this alliance presents marketers and businesses with a great new tool to reach out to the Indian consumer with sharper and greater precision. Today, younger Indians for instance, prefer texting and chat over voice communications and understanding this behavior can only help define better data consumption and customer acquisition strategies for operators and handset providers. The on-device metering that is used in this study is a pioneering technology that will, for the first time give advertisers, content developers and telecom players an insight into how the mobile consumer is evolving.

For instance, we now know that 3G users consume significantly more data than 2G users and that Android users download and consume a greater volume of Apps. These analytics combined with Nielsen’s expertise in consumer understanding will offer marketers an unmatched view of a powerful new medium.

Key Findings by Nielsen Informate Mobile Insights

• Smartphone users in India are using their phones for more than 2 and a half hours per day, of which communication (calls, SMS, emails) accounts for only 28% of usage
• Younger Smartphone users (15-25 yr olds) spend more than 3 hrs per day on their phones and spend
• 60% of the time on entertainment & browsing e.g., gaming, surfing the net and multimedia
• 68% of 15-24 year olds used a chat App last month as compared to 42% for the 31+ age group
• Data usage for 3G users was close to 44% more than 2G users
• An Android user installs an average of 19 Apps in a month compared to 10 Apps for a Symbian user
• 84% of Android users played a game in the last month compared to 59% for Symbian users

About Nielsen

Nielsen Holdings N.V. (NYSE: NLSN) is a global information and measurement company with leading market positions in marketing and consumer information, television and other media measurement, online intelligence, mobile measurement, trade shows and related properties. Nielsen has a presence in approximately 100 countries, with headquarters in New York, USA and Diemen, the Netherlands. For more information, please visit www.nielsen.com

About Informate Mobile Intelligence

Informate Mobile Intelligence, an innovative and valuable service provider in the telecom industry, is India’s premier provider of information based on actual mobile usage with the help of its on-device metering technology installed on panelists’ handsets. Informate provides vital insights to telecom operators, handset manufacturers, VAS application developers and advertisers. www.informatemi.com

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