When I looked at this Infograph below and read the article in the URL below this morning , I felt my mind being half blown away by the sheer implications of the data presented!
https://www.burga.com/blogs/news/mobile-users-spend-over-350-million-daily-on-games-and-apps-in-2021
There is a new pandemic around the corner that is going to envelop the world long after the Coronavirus (hopefully soon in 2022?) leaves us alone… It’s called the MAD virus … short for Mobile Apps aDdiction virus … It is more infectious than Delta and more contagious than Omicron. And there is no vaccine against it.
Worldwide mobile-smartphone users are approximately spending $370 million daily, translating to $11 billion monthly on mobile apps and games in 2021. Please understand the Infograph above. The cumulative spend for 2021 represents a growth of 19.71% from last year’s figure of $111.1 billion!
The world population is presently estimated to have exceeded 7.9 billion people as of November 2021. So, one might say that the Global Per-Capita Spend on mobile games and apps is $ 16.8 … and that in a world where the World Bank has said about 9.2% of the world population, or 700 million people, live in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 a day! Read below:
https://lifewater.org/blog/9-world-poverty-statistics-to-know-today/#:~:text=%231.,international%20line%20for%20extreme%20poverty.
To put things in perspective, it took over 2 million years of human prehistory and history for the world’s population to reach 1 billion and only 200 years more to grow to 7 billion.
By the same token, it took probably fewer than a mere 20 years — from invention to worldwide proliferation — for mobile telephony to grow from Zero to 6.4 billion mobile smartphone devices currently estimated to be in the hands of people.
The plain and unmistakable truth of the matter is that this worldwide craving for mobile devices, apps and games is an Addiction with pandemic proportions and implications.
Let’s look at the proportions first before examining the implications. Just one data-point will more than suffice to describe the virulence, infectiousness and sheer contagiousness of the MAD Virus.
The MAD viral addiction: More than one-third of consumers worldwide said they check their phone within five minutes of waking up in the morning, and 20 percent of them check their phone more than 50 times a day!! The reliance on smartphones seems likely to increase as more features become available. The addiction therefore is certainly set to grow exponentially amongst people across the world.
The mobile device — powered by the MAD virus — is penetrating and infesting every aspect of an average human’s life today on earth turning him or her into a zombie who finds it virtually impossible to carry out even normal default-transactions of quotidian domestic life!
We live in a world today that without the aid of a smart phone we cannot realise, or can realise with only very great difficulty, both small tasks and large operations alike such as Retail shopping, banking transactions, people-to-people communication, medical diagnostics and therapeutics, health-monitoring and public health-care, e-governance, schools and classroom education, news and entertainment media, publishing, transportation and logistics … and last but not the least, transnational cyber-terrorism too…
Interestingly , it is the pandemic caused by the Corona virus which in fact has created a massive wave of growth for the MAD-virus. In fact the two viruses feed into and feed off each other!
As the Burga Report says:
“The expected mobile app spending in 2021 follows a supercharged 2020 when the ecosystem underwent various changes with a shift in consumer behavior inspired by the coronavirus pandemic. As the world embarks on normal operations, the growth in spending and downloads indicate that the trends established last year continue to develop alongside being engraved in consumers’ daily lives. Initial signals were that the pandemic-driven changes in consumer spending would outlast the lockdowns to continue impacting mobile trends.”
Read also below the Deloitte report. The MAD-virus and the Corona-virus are working in tandem on the global population!
Now , let’s turn to the social implications of the MAD virus.
The MAD virus in the not too distant future is most certainly going to create amongst all mankind a great divide that will be far wider and far more unbridgeable than the sort of gaping “Digital Divide” we have known or ourselves imagined today as existing and rapidly growing between a third of the world population which is “digitally illiterate” (I.e. does not own or have access to a mobile) and the other two-thirds which considers itself already tech-savvy and “advanced” … if not aspiring to become so.
According to a recent Pew Research Report, the growth in mobile technology to date has not been equal, either across nations or within them. People in advanced economies are more likely to have mobile phones – smartphones in particular – and are more likely to use the internet and social media than people in emerging economies. For example, a median of 76% across 18 advanced economies surveyed have smartphones, compared with a median of only 45% in emerging economies.
There is also an even far greater Divide amongst the producers and manufacturers themselves of Mobile and Smartphone devices. The technological inventions and innovations they all pursue very competitively today are only going to end up being owned and exploited by fewer and fewer players amongst them. This fact is starkly portrayed in this chart below:
Now what does the above state of affairs of tell me?
It tells me that the MAD Virus is to the global Mobile/Smart Phone industry indeed exactly what the Corona Virus (and its continuing variants) is to the global Pharma industry (more specifically to the vaccine-maker industry).
— Both industries enjoy the benefit of having the entire global population as their market-size.
— Both industries strategically hope to thrive on the back of global market conditions wherein a pandemic continues to afflict — or threatens to afflict — nearly all people of the world. That indeed is the structural market-condition or general strategic landscape — i.e. a fundamental business assumption of chronic pandemic pathology— on which their Long-term Business Plans are all going to be made going forward in the decades to come. The top-5 or fewer Pharma companies indicated in the above chart will hope to sustain themselves on the prevalence of the Corona-virus and on its emerging variants to keep the market-size for vaccines and boosters either growing at a CAGR of around 1-3% or at least not shrinking below that level in the mid to long term. And similarly, the top-5 or fewer Mobile/SmartPhone companies of the world too will hope to sustain themselves on the MAD-virus and its technology-innovation variants, that will get rolled out from time to time, to keep the market-size for mobile-devices either growing at a steady and healthy clip or at least not declining in the mid to long term.
— Both industries will strive and succeed in forging and maintaining collaborative or symbiotic arrangements with the Governments of all major countries in which the growth rates for their industry will continue to clock the highest globally. No matter what the other geopolitical tensions and potential conflicts between USA, EU, China, Russia, Japan and Australasia might be, the Pharma and Mobile/Smartphone industries will always enjoy the constant support and patronage of those governments for the simple reason that Governments too sustain themselves — i.e. they regard it as their very raison d’être and their relevance to the public — by appearing to be heroically fighting a pandemic like Covid, on the one hand, and on the other, promoting the other pandemic, the MAD-virus too since it’s continuing growth serves as a great indicator of human-resource development undertaken by them in their respective countries.
Meanwhile — and finally, to conclude I say this— the people of the world at large will of course only continue to be buying both vaccines and the mobile-smartphones for many decades ahead . The demographic profile of the world today supports that conclusion. Why? Because, persons of every age in the world — irrespective of race, creed, religion, education or income — has to get a vaccine as protection against a pandemic virus ; and equally, every person in the world today has to get himself/herself a mobile smart device to satisfy an addiction caused by the MAD virus. Even the oldies are really clamouring these days for smart-phones as much as the young yuppies! And the same trend of clamouring is seen in emerging countries too as is evident in the advanced ones . See charts below.
All in all, the world scenario today only leads me to believe that in the Brave New Digital World of tomorrow, the governments of the world will succeed in their mission where Queen Marie Antoinette did not … Metaphorically speaking, they will succeed in giving their dumb masses of peoples both real bread to barely survive upon and synthetic cakes too to feast upon … i.e. life-saving Vaccines as bread and shiny Smartphones as cake. But it is really going to be the Big Pharmas and Mobile-makers of the world who through it all will be eating their cake and having it too!
Sudarshan Madabushi
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