Smartphone penetration hits 42% across 'EU5'

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Posted 26 January 2012 11:53am by David Moth with 0 comments

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Smartphone penetration reached 42% across the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany (EU5) in October, compared to 39% in the US.

The data from comScore shows that Symbian is the dominant operating system in the EU5 with 32% market share, compared to 28% for Android and 21% for iOS.

Furhter underlining the importance for retailers to establish a strong mobile presence, comScore found that 75% of smartphone owners used their phone to browse the web, use an app or download content.

A total of 13.6m people accessed a retail site using a smartphone in the EU5, with Germany the fastest growing market increasing 112%.

Young males are driving m-commerce, as the chart below shows.

Interestingly the most popular m-commerce activity was accessing a bank account (20.3% of users), which indicates that smartphone owners trust security on the platform.

Visiting an online retailer (13.9%) was the second most popular activity, followed by accessing electronic payments (12.1%) and looking up shopping guides (10.9%).

The report also shows that smartphones are increasingly becoming part of the in-store shopping experience.

Over a fifth (21.8%) of smartphones owners had used their device to take a photo of a product, while 14.9% had called or texted a friend about a product and 10.9% had scanned a barcode.

In terms of the share of overall internet traffic, mobile now accounts for 3.2% across the EU5 while tablets take up 1.4%.

Of the five nations, mobile's share of traffic is highest in the UK at 5.1%, with Spain the second highest at 2.7%

Learn more...

The UK Internet Statistics Compendium is a comprehensive collection of the most recent worldwide statistics and market data publicly available on online marketing, e-commerce, the internet and related digital media. It includes a section on the latest m-commerce statistics.

The Mobile Websites and Apps Optimization Best Practice Guide, written by Craig Sullivan, Group Customer Experience Manager for Belron, aims to encourage companies to use this growing channel effectively. By designing around customers, their handsets, context and goals, companies can maximise visitor traffic and conversions.

David Moth is a Reporter at Econsultancy. You can follow him on Twitter.