Qualcomm: Smartphone boom still to come

4bn smartphones to be sold in next 3 years

14 September 2011 8:09 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Qualcomm CEO, Paul Jacobs, has said the company expects over 4 billion smartphones to be sold in the next 3 years.

Talking at the company’s Innovation Qualcomm event in Istanbul, the CEO added that the majority of growth will be from the sub-$300 market, as more and more people buy a smartphone for the first time.

"Most of the growth is coming from the sub $300 segment," Jacobs told the audience of European journalists and analysts. "This will be their main device to access the Internet."

According to recent data four out of every five connections are from emerging markets, as developing countries like Brazil, India, China and Russia continue to come online in the same way as the UK and the US.

The company also expects over 2 billion new 3G connections by 2015.

According to Qualcomm's European head, Enrico Salvatori, those numbers mean smartphones will be 65 per cent of the UK mobile phone business by 2015.

But it’s not just smartphones that are expected to continue to grow some 40 per cent in the next couple of years, tablets and other connected devices are in for a boom, according to Jacobs.

"Tablets will grow 25 per cent year on year for the next four years,” said Jacobs. "You hear about people talking of an Internet of things, we talk about an internet of everything."

Full tags

Phones, Tablets, Qualcomm