The share of Internet traffic from smartphones and tablets is growing, the cost of devices is decreasing

According to the Russian operator MTS (statistics of the third quarter of 2013), the number of smartphone and tablet users is steadily growing, because the price of these devices is constantly decreasing. Mobile Internet is mostly used by smartphone owners, but in terms of the saturation of the transmitted data traffic, they are in second place after tablet computer users.

The most common device for accessing the Internet in Russia is a smartphone. 45% of mobile Internet users use this device to access the Internet. However, the total volume of data traffic for smartphones was only 20% (data at the end of September 2013), which is much less than that of tablet computers.

Although there are much fewer owners of tablets than smartphones, but data traffic in Internet networks is already 8% without including data transmitted via Wi-Fi. As a result, on average, data traffic consumption through tablets is three times higher than through smartphones.

During the year of smartphone sales in the Russian market (the third quarter of 2012 – the third quarter of 2013), the price of smartphones became lower by an average of 11% – this is 9353 rubles. Compared to smartphones, the price of tablet computers fell much lower – by 29% and amounted to 11,416 rubles. Such a decrease in prices is due to the fact that residents of Russia are increasingly buying similar devices worth up to 15,000 rubles. According to the results of the third quarter of 2013, 60% of smartphones and 45% of tablets were sold in this price category. If we count the sales by the piece, then this is 82% of smartphones and 70% of tablet computers.

In 2013, 5.5 million smartphones were sold in the third quarter alone, which is 58% higher than in the same period of 2012. Accordingly, the indicators of the third quarter of 2013 increased by 40% compared to the same period of 2012 and by 51.5 billion rubles in monetary terms. During the same period, smartphones expanded their segment by 17.0 percentage points – 47% of the phones sold in Russia were smartphones. If we consider the monetary ratio, then it is the sales of smartphones that have grown to 83% of the sales of phones in general.  Therefore, the annual increase was 16 percentage points.

So, in Russia in 2013, tablets began to be bought 2.3 times more than in 2012 by 1.9 million. In just one year (the third quarter of 2012-2013), tablet sales reached 22 billion rubles, in general, this is 1.7 times more.