If you want to do business in Turkey, do it mobile

We are all becoming mobile consumers as the price of the intelligent devices and connectivity drops all around the world. Many different research studies have shown us that fixed internet is dead and now is the time of mobility. Two different reports by Deloitte give us a glimpse into the future.

Deloitte’s second Global Mobile Consumer Survey, which provides insight into the mobile consumer behavior of 26,960 respondents across 15 countries, tells us that Turkey leads in mobile internet connectivity with 91 percent of smart phones connected among the developing countries. However, penetration of unlimited packages is very low at just 16 percent. This means that mobile phone users in Turkey don’t feel the need to have limitless connectivity. The number rises to 33 percent when asked if they would prefer a limitless package. When Turks were asked what they would like to own in the coming 12 months, 35 percent answered with a smart phone and 37 percent said tablets.

According to Deloitte’s Open Mobile report, however, the change in the mobile power structure is accelerating – new entrants continue to rewrite the rules on competition. For example, 49 percent of respondents believe that Internet or web-based companies, rather than network carriers or handset makers, will dominate the mobile industry in five years. Moreover, 89 percent believe the role of carriers will be limited to delivering data access anywhere and anytime. Meanwhile, 87 percent state that to sustain competitiveness, carriers must make the transition from the walled gardens of the past to new organizational models built around open development ecosystems.

Mobile services are poised to dominate future revenue opportunities – mobile cloud, M2M and mobile payments are thought to hold the most value potential: In the short term, a majority 51 percent of respondents thought that mobile services in areas such as social media and networking, location-based technologies and general mobile commerce. will have more potential value than sub-segments such as mobile search advertising, display advertising and mobile software applications. Digging deeper, most think mobile cloud computing and mobile payments hold the biggest potential for carrier value generation in the next three years, closely followed by increased utilization of machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies. With regards to the app economy, gaming is thought to be the most lucrative paid app category for paid applications five years out, while apps for social networking, broad-based entertainment and mobile navigation round-out the top four. In the enterprise apps category, customer relationship management (CRM) apps are thought to hold the most potential value for developers in the next five years, closely followed by apps in the productivity category. Finally, 85 percent of respondents believe the long-anticipated arrival of HTML 5 is unlikely to impact the general health of the paid app economy.

When these two reports are read together we see that Turkey is going to be mobile dominated in the coming days as both the number of mobile devices are on the rise and the trend is in the mobile applications’ favor.