Europe is to be the focus for growth in the next decade due to the mobile phone, says HSBC senior fund manager – European equities, Chris Rice.
Europe is to be the focus for growth in the next decade due to the mobile phone, says HSBC senior fund manager – European equities, Chris Rice.
“Europe is leading the world in mobile phone technology and we expect there will be more mobile phones than people in the world in the future,” he told a briefing in Melbourne.
Technology has played a role in the growth of a particular market during the past two decades. In the eighties Japan grew with the boom in VCRs. The nineties have seen the growth of PCs and this has benefited US markets. The growth of Internet traffic and office software saw Microsoft and Intel become dominant players.
Rice argues the mobile phone will replace laptops and European companies like Nokia will be dominant global players. Last month Nokia became Europe’s largest company by market capitalisation, replacing Royal Dutch Shell.
“Mobile phones are the world’s fastest-growing consumer market,” he says. “In Finland (Nokia’s home base) 75 per cent of the population own mobile phones.”
According to data by Merrill Lynch, sales of cellular handsets will reach about 1 billion globally by 2003. This compares to sales of 300 million PCs in the same year.
Rice says the big growth market for mobiles is for sending and receiving data. “We estimate 40 per cent of all traffic sent on mobiles will be data and not voice by next year,” he says.
When Netcom launched its data message system for mobiles in Europe this year, 30 million messages were sent in the first three months of operation.
“We are on the first minute of the first hour in the growth of the mobile phone,” Rice says.
Mobiles are also being used in Europe as a means of transmitting transaction data for things like Coke machines. Rice sees this as extending into financial services, with Internet banking being done from the next generation of mobile phones which are being launched at the moment.
