African mobile web still growing massively - report

27 May 2009

Web browser Opera today, Wednesday, 27 May 2009, released its latest State of the Mobile Web report, which provides information on the top global trends affecting the mobile web. In addition to the top global trends and country snapshots, the report highlights trends in Africa and aggregate operator data for the top 10 countries.

African mobile web still growing massively - report

Global trends

In April 2009, Opera Mini had over 23.4 million users, up more than 140% compared to April 2008.
Opera Mini users viewed nearly 8.7 billion pages in April 2009.
Since April 2008, page views have increased 249%.
Last month, Opera Mini users generated more than 151 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed up to 1.4 PB of data in April. Over the previous year, data traffic is up 295%.
Opera Mini usage in Nigeria continues to surge, pushing past Poland and taking the #9 spot.

Africa trends

The top 12 countries using Opera Mini in Africa are South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Zambia, Tanzania, Cote d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Namibia, Ghana and Gabon. Since the last report on Africa, Nigeria has jumped from #4 to #2 and Zambia jumped from #9 to #6. Mozambique, Namibia, Ghana and Gabon are new features.

From April 2008 to April 2009:

Overall page-views in the top 12 countries listed increased 422%.
Overall unique users in the top 12 countries listed increased 169%.
Overall data transferred in the top 12 countries listed increased 348%.

According to the report, growth rates continue to soar in Africa, especially in Libya, with 4,155% user growth since April 2008, and in Nigeria, with 2,353% user growth since April 2008. Kenya leads the top 12 countries in page views, with each user browsing 372 pages on average each month.

Operator data trends

Customers of US operators view more data-intensive pages than subscribers in any other country. The average page viewed over US operator networks is approximately 32KB compressed or almost 320KB uncompressed.
Ukraine operator customers viewed 582 pages per month, on average. Ukraine operators also have the highest data transfer per user at more than 10MB per month compressed. This is as much as 100MB of mobile data per user uncompressed.

"Opera Mini has helped create and define the mobile Web experience for consumers around the world," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Our relentless focus on delivering the best possible mobile web experience helps drive adoption of mobile data plans. We believe that Opera Mini is the perfect win-win solution for both operators and consumers alike."

To view the full report, go to www.opera.com/smw/.