Marshall Brain's Blog

The article is entitled Cell Phone Vendors Ring Up Record Year. It says:

A record number of cell phones were sold last year by manufacturers, primarily due to people replacing their handsets with newer models and increased sales in emerging markets, market-research firm Gartner said.

Worldwide shipments totaled 520 million units in 2003, a 20.5% increase over 2002 sales, Gartner said. Sales were so good that manufacturers struggled to meet demand.

There are roughly 6 billion people on the planet -- this means that 1 out of every 11 people worldwide got a new cell phone handset last year. That's a lot of handsets...

Since half the people on the planet are subsisting on less than $1,000 per year, we can probably imagine that they aren't buying cell phones at the moment. So it is more like 1 out of every 5 people with any disposable income bought all those new handset last year. Imagine what the market for cell phones would look like if we could figure out a way to raise the standard of living of the poorest 3 billion people.