Survey Shows Malaysian Site Owners and Advertisers should Optimise for Mobile Web

If you were asked to give up your smartphone or your TV, which would you choose?
Earlier this year, Google teamed up with IPSOS Research to learn the answer to this question and many others -- by asking 30,000 people in 30 countries, including Malaysia, about how they use their smartphones, giving us a detailed snapshot of how consumers around the globe think about their smartphones.

It’s the first time anyone has asked this many people the same questions, and it means we can compare and contrast behaviour and trends across countries: we can compare how someone in Malaysia uses mobile banking as opposed to someone in, say, France.

And as we’ve always made clear, we want to make this rich trove of information accessible to everyone -- journalists, marketers, advertisers, app developers, and academics--so that an app developer can make educated decisions about which countries to market their apps, or a reporter can learn how widespread mobile social networking is in his home country.

We’re pleased to announce that today, we’ve made this data publicly available in, via http://www.ourmobileplanet.com, which is also available in Bahasa Malaysia.

Now, anyone can go to Our Mobile Planet to create instant charts and graphs comparing, say, how many Malaysians notice mobile ads versus Australia.

To get you started, here are some interesting things we learned about Malaysia:

• 1 in 3 Malaysians say they would rather give up their TV than their smartphone.
  
• On a daily basis: 43% of Malaysian smartphone users go onto the mobile Internet.
  
• 68% say they never leave home without their smartphones and 58% say they first access information on their smartphones and then follow up to find more info on their laptops / PCs.
  
• 64% of smartphone owners use their devices to get on the net to get information when not in front of a computer and 47% say their smartphones provide them with a quick answer to a question when they need an immediate answer.
  And Malaysia compared to other countries in the region:
  
• Japan, Korea & Taiwan have the greatest proportion (~80%) of smartphone users for whom this is their first smartphone. Australia, India & Malaysia are also at 80%, ahead of rest of world. A full 23% of Australian smartphone users have had their phone for less than 3 months, second only to South Korea with 28% having purchased their smartphone in just the last 3 months.
  
• Southeast Asian consumers are as or more likely to have made a purchase on their smartphone than U.S. users. Consumers in Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia report
  significantly higher likelihood to have made a purchase, while Malaysian consumers report a slightly higher propensity.
  
• Intention to use more apps in the future seems to be significantly higher in developing Asian-Pacific economies, as compared to developed countries across the world. For example, 39% of US and UK consumers, and 45% of Japanese consumers, intend to use more apps in the future, while over 60% of Malaysian, Thai, and Indian consumers and 59% of Indonesian consumers intend to do so.
  

In addition to charts and graphs, Our Mobile Planet site visitors can also choose to download the data as an image, a spreadsheet file, or an open CSV (comma-separated value) format.

We hope that everyone finds this wealth of information as entertaining and useful as we have.

About the data 

This study is a global effort conducted in partnership by Google, Ipsos and the MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) to get insights about the mobile user and its mobile usage. To better understand the mobile usage, the OurMobilePlanet site provides deep dives into the search, video, social and email behaviour, as well as mobile research and purchase intentions. Most of the data is set into context to the classical desktop internet to evaluate difference and similarities between these channels.  

About the survey methodology

• Timing - surveys were administered during March and July 2011.
  
• Population - target population were the private smartphone user, who accessed the mobile internet on their device in each country surveyed. Frame population (sample base) was from Ipsos online access panels and partner panels in each country surveyed.
  
• Sampling -samples in each country surveyed were aimed to be representative of the target population. Sample sizes are n=6,000 in the US, n=2,000 in Germany, UK, France and Japan, n=500 in Indonesia and Malaysia and n=1,000 in each other country surveyed. Quotas were applied in the sampling process with regard to age, gender, mobile internet usage and mobile brand, as to ensure representivity.