The phone is no longer a phone. One more barrier between phone and computer came up. The TV set is no longer connected only to a cable TV service but also to the Internet and content may come from companies that have nothing to do with telecom providers.
Battery life remains a problem for mobile phones, especially now that we can watch movies or live TV on them, we can play, read news and – let’s not forget – still talk and send messages, though not necessarily using the short message service of yore.
Things have changed tremendously and the mobile phone has become more and more of a gateway to information and entertainment, say the representatives of Google, which now dominates the Romanian Internet search market, too.
According to Statcounter.com, 97% of the web searches performed in Romania from computers are done via Google, while the searches performed from smartphones use this engine 99% of the times.
Managing tens of millions of searches from users in Romania every day, Google has noticed an accelerated rise in smartphone searches, says Doina Costache, industry manager with the local subsidiary of the US company.
“In the middle of last year around 7% of all searches were generated by mobile devices. This is indeed an accelerated rise and mobile searches have reached close to 15% of the total,” Doina Costache says.
“The yearly increase in mobile searches remains fast-paced compared with desktop searches, as it did last year. We have currently reached five times as many searches in 2013 against 2010. Figures speak for themselves,” she adds.
The accelerated rise of smartphone searches comes amid rising sales of devices and amid changes in client behavior.
“In December last year three out of four mobile phones sold were smartphones, according to data we have from mobile phone operators.”
Last year’s estimates point to sales of one million smartphones from 600,000 in 2011. This year Gersim, the largest local distributor of mobile phones, estimates smartphone sales could rise 50%.
This trend showed in the results of Orange, the largest local mobile telephony provider, says Jean Francois Fallacher, its chief executive. In the last quarter of 2012 “we have noticed a stronger then ever appetite for smartphones and tablets. There really is a trend, a migration from voice services to data use, to messages through social networks, towards multimedia, the trend we have seen already in all Western European countries.”
In the fourth quarter of 2012 data services reached 23% of Orange’s service revenues, double as much as in 2008 and three percent more than in the previous quarter.
“Voice revenues are on a slight decline and data revenues make up for this decline at market level,” he added.
Tablets are clearly gaining huge ground and PCs are losing it on the consumer segment, says Bogdan Iftemie, sales manager of the local subsidiary of Acer, the largest laptop vendor in Romania.
The Acer official says this trend is not only visible in the Excel spreadsheets PC makers use when assessing performance, but also when looking around.
“I’ve noticed two things while walking through the city: a middle-aged lady was taking photos with a tablet and a small bar showed me the menu at the door on a touch screen display, pictures and prices to be precise. My conclusion is that on the consumer segment, the customers are interested in pure ‘commodity’, that is ease of use and affordable price; they’ll buy a tablet over a laptop and a photo camera. It’s the old lesson Sony learnt with Walkman: customers don’t want high performance and top of the line specs, they want the optimal mix of the two. The tablet is now the mix the market wants and has become the reference used when buying technology.”
Sales of tablets surged in Romania to about 200,000 units last year from some 40,000 in 2011 and are expected to reach 300,000 units in 2013. Portable computer sales amounted to some 540,000 units last year. Adding desktop computers and servers, sales stood at more than 700,000 units.
Sales of tablets in the last (calendar) quarter of 2012 were ten times higher for Vodafone, the second largest mobile telephony provider in Romania, according to CEO Inaki Berroeta.
“We sold about ten times more tablets than last Christmas,” Berroeta said, adding that the third quarter was significantly different for the company compared with the previous year in terms of products sold, as the penetration of data service related products, especially tablets, increased.
As the number of smartphones has increased, reaching a penetration rate of 15% of the total population in 2012, and users have also started to buy mobile services data, data search behavior has also changed, says Doina Costache.
“A single user is connected to several devices at the same time: for instance they have a TV turned on, and they use the smartphone to search for additional information about something they saw on TV. It’s the natural trend of today’s people somehow: they are almost always on the move, which means there’s the urge to take out the mobile phone and search for data, read, and see everything that happens.”
Google data on mobile device searches only considers smartphones and excludes tablets, Doina Costache explains.
She says Google has noticed that gradually users have started to use tablets as they use desktops, so the company does not consider tablets mobile devices. Instead it includes them in the same category as netbooks, laptops and desktops because they are much more static devices.
Google has made changes to the way its clients can run campaigns so as to adjust them to the user’s context and to make it easier for mobile devices to be included in the campaigns, according to Doina Costache.
“We changed the focus a bit from device to context. We are talking about a world where users no longer care what device they use to access news, content, your business; what matters is the context it is in, which is why it is very important for a business, be it a publisher, a SME, a businessperson, to be in the suitable and relevant context for its users.”
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu and Daniela Stoican)