Hong Kong

Earlier this year We Are Social published a lengthy presentation giving an overview of internet and mobile across the APAC region.

The stats showed Hong Kong to have one of the highest rates of mobile penetration in the region at 228%, with more than 16m active subscriptions.

Last month, international data and mobile ad specialists Vpon dropped more trends that dug a little deeper into the make-up of the market. Android dominates, being the operating system in use on more than 86% of devices. And of these, nearly 56% are larger ‘phablet’ devices.

While Android wins in the OS stakes, most mobile internet browsing (40.6%) happens via Safari over Android’s browser (35.3%) and Chrome (24.1%).

India

By comparison to the far smaller Hong Kong market, We Are Social’s more recent presentation on India sees 28% of the population using mobile devices. This is still a massive 349m unique users who own one.

One similarity with Hong Kong is the likelihood that many Indian mobile users own more than one device. The data also highlights that there are 886m active subscriptions across the country.

There are some interesting mobile internet stats among We Are Social’s latest India slides too. 185m people use their mobile devices to go online in the country, that’s 15% of the overall population.

[See our India: Digital Market Landscape Report for more data and trends from the analysts and businesses in the country.]

Taiwan

Back to Vpon’s latest round of reports and its data looking at the Taiwan market. In the Asia, Taiwan sits somewhere in between Hong Kong’s saturated market and India’s growth potential.

The top 10 mobile devices in the country makes for interesting reading, with iPhone 5 ranked number one and the 5s number three.

But Android really rules the market here too, with 81% of devices running the Google OS. Phablets are also the most popular devices in the country too, though only slightly.

46% of Android devices on the market are the bigger phablet design compared to 44% phones and 10% tablets. Phablets have increased in popularity from 43% share in Q1.

Takeaways

It’s good to see some mobile data from Asia looking at some of the smaller countries alongside those with such huge growth potential, if only to reiterate the variety of the region.

The popularity of phablets in the more mature markets is an intriguing trend – and one that those from the smartphone-centric west should be taking note of, especially if they are keen to make in-roads in the east.

This is also notable in relation to the fact that mobile users – across Hong Kong, India and Taiwan at least – are likely to have more than one mobile device, and phablets may be doing best at providing the functionality of larger and smaller devices for those who have become used to owning several.

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