The Ideas Blog

The tech industry has been hailed as a boon for growth and job creation.

But upon closer inspection of multi-billion dollar valuations and scrappy startups on their way to profitability, you might notice that the revenues these companies command are wildly disproportionate to the number of people they employ.

Facebook, which some have valued at $100 billion after filing for an IPO last week, employs a mere 3,000 people. Compare that with General Motors, which raised the biggest IPO in history in 2010. Its estimated market cap at the time of this writing is only $41.4 billion, and they employ a whopping 202,000 workers to create that value.
This should come as no surprise. It takes a lot more people to build a car than to build an app.
We thought it might be interesting to parse all these billions in relation to the actual people who work for these companies. How much money and value is being pulled in per employee? And which tech companies are getting the biggest bang for their payroll buck?
Our friends at research and analysis firm Statista have put together these handy charts to show which companies are maximizing employee return.

So here are some of the most interesting trends and graphs we came across in the later part of 2011 (therefore showing trends of 2011). They are from a variety of sources and we have tried to include the relevant credit at the bottom of each.

We will be adding a couple more as this is a useful repository of mobile stats and trends in the industry (and globally).

Enterprise Mobile Apps - 2011 Stats

Some-interesting-Smartphone-Stats-2011

Smartphone - Penetration - various countries

Number of apps installed per user (avearge) various countries

Operating systems in China - Mobile - 2011

India - type of Smartphone Usage

India - Smartphone Apps per user

UK - Smartphone OS - 2011

 

Smartphones in India - 2011

 

HTML5 capabilities of UK Devices - 2011

FeaturePhones are still in majority - 2011

Chart of Global Smartphone Penetration

Global smartphone penetration by operating system is only 27%. While smartphone penetration is over 50% in North America (44% in the US) and European markets, its under 20% in the Asia-Pacific region, Africa region, and Latin America.

Smartphone adoption across markets

In November 2011, Q3 reports showed that China surpassed the U.S. in unit shipment volume of smartphones for the first time: nearly 24 million smartphones were shipped compared to 23 million in the US. In China, there are almost one billion mobile subscribers and roughly 10% are thought to be smartphone users.  350 million subscribers access the mobile internet. There continues to be 8 to 10 million new subscribers being added each month. As of Q2 2011, about 50 percent are 3G users.  In Tier 1 cities, smartphone penetration is over 50%.  In urban cities (a combination of Tier 1 and Tier 2), smartphone penetration is 35%, still good for third place behind Singapore at 62% and Australia at 37%. However, nationwide, smartphone penetration is a mere 15%.

Segmenting 1 billion mobile subscribers

In light of the data presented above, the question for marketers and brand managers who hope to reach the majority of Chinese consumers shouldn’t be which smartphone or operating system is going to win the war in China, but how does one create apps and digital campaigns to successfully reach the other 85% of Chinese mobile users nationally who still use a wide spectrum of single-feature and more advanced feature phones?

Sohu is China’s leading online media, search, gaming, community and mobile service group. Spreadtrum is a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer, leader in 2G and 3G wireless communications, and supporter of a WRE (“Windows Runtime Environment”) for feature phones. The two companies very recently entered a partnership to provide an app store for feature phones on Sohu’s internet portal. The app store will support applications both from Sohu and other mobile developers and deliver rich Internet applications and services to China consumers. The goal is to bring smartphone and app store capability to the highest volume phone segment in China and emerging markets and to transform the traditional definition of feature phones.  Dr. Charles Zhang, Sohu.com Inc’s Chairman and CEO, said: “By cooperating with Spreadtrum, we can provide a variety of mobile internet services to this group of users (feature phone users), including web, video, microblogging, search, maps and other applications.”

Across the strait in Taiwan, an integrated circuit designer named MediaTek has teamed up with Facebook to enhance the functions of its feature phones in hopes of gaining a larger market share in India. The company’s technology is able to upgrade feature phones into Internet-enabled “smart-feature” phones. Earlier this year, it signed up Yahoo to enable its phones to access Yahoo content.

Internationally, telecom companies and device manufacturers have sought to enhance feature phone offerings by integrating a Facebook button.  We see this a few Orange Telecom powered TLC handsets as well as a few HTC handsets.  The goal here is to give the 50% of customers still purchasing feature phones at Orange stores a phone that can appeal to younger phone buyers and those in emerging markets.

Nokia's Asha line as seen at Nokia World 2011

FabriQate has worked closely with Nokia over the years to develop applications that work on advanced feature phones as well as the latest Nokia smartphones.  Our focus at Nokia World 2011 wasn’t solely on the new Lumia line, but also its Asha line. The Asha line runs on its Series 40 (S40) platform, which Nokia has plans to upgrade into a simpler version of MeeGo. This will allow Nokia to expand its delivery options of apps beyond the current method of embedding. At the same time, Nokia will try to convince the developer pool to create content and apps for the Nokia Store using the Qt framework, which promises to allow smooth and quick porting of apps to the S40 platform. Nokia still plans to reach the next billion mobile subscribers and its advantage in providing feature phones to emerging markets is a sound one. The proportion of its total shipments made up of feature phones rose from approximately 75% in Q3 2010 to 85% in Q3 2011. Through our work on Nokia’s Symbian OS and a variety of Nokia devices, we’re finding out that engagement can be just as high on feature phones apps as on smartphone apps.

Finally, FabriQate’s Manav Gupta recently spoke on monetizing “that” apps at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congrsess in Hong Kong. But when Manav wasn’t speaking, he was definitely listening to latest buzz around mobile in Asia. Three key observations he recalled are below:

Facebook: We have more engagement on our feature phone apps then we do on our smartphone apps. This is the only app that they need. They have a desire to be social and we provide that. Farmers can get crop pricing from the nearest town to know how to better price their goods. Our next 1 BILLION customers will come from feature phones.

Google: We have more search queries originating from feature phones on a daily basis.

InMobi: When a feature phone gets a full featured HTML browser then the lines blur between a feature and a smartphone with the advent of HTML5.

A few weeks ago, FabriQate was at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress to speak on monetizing “that” apps at an AppBytes session.

Manav Gupta led a thirty minute presentation that focused on defining “that” apps, explaining monetization business models, user segmentation, and the willingness of brands to spend their mobile marketing budgets.

When it came time to ask what brand marketers actually cared about when considering app ideas from developers or devising them in-house, Manav turned to a panel of brand and marketing managers who FabriQate has had strong relationships with.

Panel members included our own Aneesh Varma, CNNGo’s Don Anderson, 3G.cn’s Nemo Sun, and McCann Healthcare’s Marcus Sigurdsson.

Overall, the presentation and panel discussion was a hit.  The audience thoroughly engaged with the topic at hand, participating in our jeopardy-like QA format, asking many additional questions, and voting on the new name for “that” apps: Magic Apps.

As Mary Meeker’s recent presentation on the state of mobile suggests, mobile advertising is ramping quickly in all geographies.  FabriQate has placed itself in a position to obtain on-the-ground market research in many of those geographies, particularly the UK, India, Hong Kong, and China.  If you would like to know our take on mobile marketing today, please don’t wait until the next conference to get in touch!

More pictures are on our Facebook page!

A look at FQ's freshly designed flyers just for the event

FQ Networking at GSMA Asia Congress

Manav on stage at Mobile Asia Congress

The panel discusses mobile ads and what brands look for in "that" apps

FabriQate engages the audience

Last week the UK India Business Council (UKIBC), who FabriQate has a long standing relationship with, kindly invited us to present at the Techworld UK conference at the ExCel exhibition centre in London. The theme was “Making Technology Work for the Indian Customer”.

Our Global Sales Director, Syd Syed, delivered an energetic and passionate presentation about FabriQate’s experiences in India, the lessons we have learned (sometimes the hard way!), and the learnings from those lessons that has shaped our strategy for that part of the world.

India is attractive to so many for the reasons you’ve heard many times – rapidly growing affluent middle class, rapid technologisation (is that a word? If not then we’re claiming it), demographic dividend of growing young population, the sheer size of the market… but it’s also well known as a potential minefield to navigate.

Extensive bureaucracy, painstakingly slow processes, a perceived lack of respect for keeping time, a set of customers who don’t quite behave like Western customers – these are just some of the reasons why the UK still does more trade with Sweden than India despite the rapid growth in the latter since David Cameron led a business delegation to India last year.

It was really interesting to share our experiences with the audience and hear what the likes of Philips and BT are doing in India – although they are hugely established companies a lot of the headaches they have had are the same as us. From our point of view being a smaller, more nimble entity has actually been an advantage. Having a pair of co-founders and some team members of Indian origin with connections and cultural understanding has helped too.

All in all it was a really beneficial experience for us and we are more than happy to talk to brands and businesses who are interested in taking their offering to mobile markets in India. Along with our strength in China it is a key part of our unique global offering and certainly one of the most interesting markets we are involved in.

Written by Niraj Shah, Business Development Manager.

Syd Syed – Global Sales Director – syd@fabriQate.com

Most of the sessions so far are talking about how the Asian scene (Emerging market driven) requires different business models for Apps Stores and even Device makers.

Talking about huge opportunity as mobile screens being the main screen for content consumption. Tablets are got to become a major screen that replaces the laptop (CEO, Vidiator). Turner APAC talking about Content Everywhere that also syncs with this concept.

Airtel India presented about India market where you can’t ignore the feature phones.

Sessions from Rovio coming up later. Also more about FabriQate presentation shortly.

(updates to follow through the day). Some images below:

We have been involved with the Enterprise Mobile Apps scene from its early days, and its amazing to see the growth in this space as more and more companies embrace mobile technology to empower and mobilise its systems (and people).

Either as a cost-saving or as a sales-acceleration, the enterprise mobile apps story is getting interesting. Just look at some of these news blurbs below that we have been tracking:

Apple CEO Tim Cook announces 92% of Fortune 500 are trying out the iPad.

Adoption by sector:
Financial service firms are the most likely to adopt the iPad – 36.8% of its customers iPad deployments are in financial services companies. Technology clocks in at 11.4%, and the healthcare industry lands at 10.5%.

Here’s a useful chart from Good Technology explaining iPad usage by industry:

Other interesting trends around devices (its mostly iPads!):

While iPad has been the clear leader in the Enterprise Mobile Apps game so far (estimates suggest over 96% market share), there are a couple issues that make other Android (or WP8) powered tablets also interesting. Most important issues with the iPad:

1. Cost — its still an expensive device compared to base level Android tablets like Amazon Fire or the Nook

2. Limited customisation — Apple has strict rules about what can and cannot be done on the iPad, so Enterprises sometimes cannot overwrite or rebrand core features. In that sense Android again has an advantage

3. Still a personal device — Many argue that the iPad is still a consumer focussed device with entertainment and fun apps. While these can be turned off (Configuration Profile), the other tablets (especially WP8) are going to be more “corporate” in their approach. This almost is going back to the Mac vs. Windows argument for enterprise where as we know Microsoft is the clear winner.

In summary, dont write off Android tablets or WP8 tablets when they launch. No one knows the Enterprise game better than Microsoft and their recent WP8 offering is very good and many would argue, its ideal for enterprise.

Please feel free to share your thoughts or pop us a visit if your company is considering enterprise mobile apps and need a sounding board. FabriQate is a dedicated mobile technology company and we have deep expertise in enterprise mobile apps for several Fortune 500 clients including handling the essential security issues.

Finally, the infographic that says it all:

The one that amazes us is that 66% of the people check their favourite app atleast once a day… wonder how many people have Facebook as their favourite app!

Just been informed that Nokia Retail stores in Asia have chosen the FabriQate Ideas app as a demo on the devices. See picture:

FabriQate Ideas app as demo in Nokia Retail in Asia

Yesterday was a special day: it saw the formalization of a dynamic new partnership with the world’s largest self-service app platform, Mobile Roadie, and the much anticipated China launch of our joint product, Q Mobao, all at a sparkling press conference at the Hilton Hotel in Guangzhou.

Among the audience of 50+ was a contingent of friends and existing clients, new and soon-t0-be partners and distributors, and the full gamut of local and national press/media.  They were treated to two rousing speeches by the partnership’s CEOs, a live demonstration of the Madonna “麦当娜” app by FabriQate’s Q Mobao lead Daniel Dong, a networking and group-interview session, and a live Q&A session, conducted by FabriQate’s BD Manager Roban Chen, to conclude.  By the time the conference was underway, the news had already reached TechCrunch, and today the Washington Post, Sohu, and many more.

Manav Gupta, FabriQate China Managing Director, announced FabriQate as Mobile Roadie’s strategic and exclusive partner, as well as its business expansion in China and around the globe.

Michael Schneider, CEO of Mobile Roadie, elaborated on its global presence as well, its broader impact to Chinese consumers, and its future plans in China.

Q Mobao, the localized version of Mobile Roadie’s successful DIY solution, allows iPhone and Android apps to be created in hours instead of months and at a fraction of the cost of custom development, with features such as music,video, and social-sharing to popular Chinese SNS, as well as data management to monitor user behavior.  Pricing can be found on the Q Mobao website.

Through a local partner, apps made on the Q Mobao platform will be accessible to China Unicom and China Mobile’s combined 900 million mobile users.

“With a web-based platform, Q Mobao aims to bring businesses and individuals custom-made iOS and Android apps that can promote their brands more effectively,” stated Gupta.  “We have a strong local R&D and Operations team that deeply understands China market’s needs. Moreover, with our global network, we are best positioned to further ease any and all strategy and creative ideation, set-up, development, and post-launch processes.”

Mobile Roadie has already amassed more than 10 million end users worldwide.  With the release of Q Mobao, FabriQate’s goal is to add a couple more zeros to that number in China as the decade progresses.

Stay tuned for additional updates and photos from the event!