More Than Half Of Europeans Own Smartphones

comScore has recently published a report on the key mobile trends across the five leading European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom) during the three month average period ending October 2012, as part of its MobiLens service.

The study found that Spain has the highest smartphone penetration in Europe, with 63.2% of mobile phone users and also experienced the strongest growth with a 14.8 percentage point increase versus the prior year. Spain is closely followed by the UK, where smartphone penetration is at 62.3%, a 14.2 increase from the same period last year. Germany presents the lowest smartphone penetration at 48.4%, despite a 14.2% increase from 2011.

This trend will only continue to grow, with the price of smartphones expected to drop dramatically in the next couple of years. According to Informa the smartphone market will begin to diverge and sales will become dominated by two poles – the low-end devices (priced below US$150) and the high-end devices (priced above US$250). The expensive smartphones will find their market share shrinking from 85% of total smartphones sold in 2011 to 33% in 2017. In contrast, the low-end smartphones will gain enormous amount of market share over the years to account for just over half (52%) of the smartphones sold in 2017.