With everyone you know owning a mobile phone your
instinctive reaction is that it must be a good thing for the economy.
Now a report from Ovum on behalf of the GSM Association puts some meat
on that assumption.
Across the original fifteen EU member countries the
mobile services industry provided a GDP contribution of €105.6bn in
2004, putting it right up there with the fishing, agriculture and
forestry sectors. Mobile is already bigger than other ICT industries
across the EU such as end user hardware and software and is continuing
to grow rapidly.
More than 2.8mn jobs across the fifteen countries are
dependent on the mobile services industry, 423, 000 in direct
employment with mobile services companies and 738,000 in support
services. Most strikingly, a massive 1,638,000 jobs are generated
indirectly. On the basis of these numbers, Ovum has calculated that the
mobile services sector generates €83.9bn in revenues for EU governments.
Ovum also shows that productivity in the mobile
industry is far higher than in the EU15 as a whole, with the average
mobile services worker generating 2.5 times more GDP than the average
EU worker (€152,000 to €60,000 respectively).
"With mobile penetration in the EU15 countries close
to 90% and a GDP contribution of €105.6bn in 2004, it is clear that the
mobile industry is critical to the EU economy and its citizens", says
David Lewin, Principal Analyst and one of the founders of Ovum.
So you were right when you thought that mobile phones were a good thing.
Ian Channing |
