Together, China and India Reach the One Billion Customer Milestone

The Asia Pacific region now contains the world's two largest mobile markets, China and India and together, these two account for 1.04bn of the world's 4.15bn mobile customers.

In fact, Asia is the only region to have more than one 100m market. The positions occupied by the top two markets remain unchanged compared to this time last year, with China still well ahead, with a total of 644.8m customers (not including the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau) which would, if added, push the PRC over the 650m mark. One year ago, China was more than twice the size of the second largest market, India, but the smaller country is rapidly closing the gap. It connected over 130m new customers in the year, to reach a total of 391.6m, compared to just 88.2m in China.

Indonesia ended Q1 08 just behind Japan. Over the last twelve months though, 42m new customers connected in Indonesia compared to fewer than 5m in Japan and today, it is the undisputed number three in the region, with 144.6m customers. Japan has only fallen one place, but with 1.7.5m customers, its lead over fifth placed Pakistan is just over 16m. Pakistan added 13.4m connections over the year and looks set to overtake Japan, if not in the next twelve months, then certainly in the next 24.

If Vietnam were to enjoy the same kind of growth over the coming year, it could just overtake Japan too. It closed the March quarter with 73.2m accounts, up 35m on the Q1 08 figure. Vietnam overtook the Philippines in so doing and indeed, all of the remaining countries on this list even though they all experienced satisfactory growth rates. The Philippines closed the quarter with 71.7m accounts, ahead of Thailand (62.7m), Bangladesh (46.3m) and South Korea (46.2m).

These ten markets account for 1.68bn customers, or 92.9% of the regional total, marginally up on the 92.5% from last year. That reflects the weight of demographics as much as anything else, with these ten having a combined population of 3.48bn or slightly more than half the world's total.