MB, Internet Growth/Demographics and PC's
Many people view the low penetration of World Wide internet access as an indicator of tremendous growth opportunity for PC's. I think this fails to take into account the barriers of language, infrastructure and opportunity.
If one looks at the demographics of global internet statistics by language, a number of conclusions can be reached. (I've used the data provided by this site).
euromktg.com
The internet is dominated by the English language. English speaking users represent less than 6% of W/W population, yet 32% of this population have access to the net.
When viewed in terms of households, (or family units), a case could be made we are approaching saturation in English speaking users.
While fewer than 2% of non-English W/W population is on-line, the barriers of language and affordibility appear to be major impediments to rapid growth.
The GDP per capita of English speakers is $27,236. For non-English it's only $4516.
To me this indicates a major barrier to opportunity.
A good case in point is China. While over 15% of W/W population is Chinese, the national average income is only $785.00. Clearly the PC is not a choice for the majority.
While hundreds of millions of Chinese own TV's, only a few million have PC's. In recognition of this a number of companies, (most notably Microsoft news.com ), are in the process of developing set-top internet devices, (ala WebTV), for this market. These devices are expected to sell for <$200.00. (One could also speculate this might be a major force in driving PC's further into the low priced commodity arena).
The vast majority of web sites are of no value to non-English users. By creating an infrastructure of Chinese dedicated content on set-top devices, I would expect this to be the future of the Chinese internet.
Intel talks of 1 billion connected PC's in the future. Look at it this way, that's the equivalent of 1/6th of every man, woman and child on earth having a "connected PC". (Or about 2/3 of world wide households/family units being "connected").
What do you think? ;-) |
