On the day that it was announced that there will be 2 billion phone subscribers across the world by sometime later this year, Nokia announced that it had just sold its billionth mobile phone! The phone, a a Nokia 1100, was sold in Nigeria earlier this summer. Nokia had a 31.9 percent mobile phone marketshare in the second quarter and manufactured over 200 million phones in 2004. The next billion should not be too far.
Excluding users with multiple connections, inactive or prepaid connections, 2 billion subscriptions means that almost a third of the world’s population owns a mobile phone. It is also expected that there will be 3 billion subscriptions by 2010.