Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker said she expects smartphone sales to surpass PC and laptop sales in 2012, with more than 450 million units sold.
One of the themes of her presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was mobile growth in China. She said China’s population of smartphone users is relatively nascent, with only 14.5 million 3G users or 2% of the population compared with 37 million in the United States. Which means China has considerable room to grow.
She said China’s top social networking site, Tencent, is the fourth-largest internet company, with US$1.8 billion in revenue and a market capitalization worth US$41 billion.
Washington Post reported Meeker as saying social networking will drive demand for smartphones in China as it already has in Japan.