Ericsson Consumer Lab / Turkey Report 08

2 weeks ago I was in a panel in TIME 08 Istanbul conference. It was about the market and consumer research of Ericsson for Turkey. There were really some interesting parts that I would like to share. Moreover, I also want to specify my ideas about the results.

First of all, the research is based on the data from 1000 consumers in a large age scale from different socio economic profiles. According to the report, Turkish consumers are so interested in new technologies but technology usage is under the world average. Maybe that can be related with the per capita net income like the other countries in the same interest group, India, Egypt, Brazil. The usage of high speed internet access and laptops is increasing, unsurprisingly. Cause, in the last 5 years, we are living a great change from dial-ups to wireless and mobile broadband.

In the report, there’s an important part about the usage of technology. Like the Russians and Italians, Turks love to use the new technology with the help of someone. I think it’s quite noteworthy. In my opinion, the reason is basic. We are used to the visuality instead of the wordings, technical drawings or procedures. As an example, let’s say I have bought a new mobile phone. I will probably prefer asking a friend how to use it rather than reading the manual or searching how-to sites. But still, this is my personal idea according to my observations.

On the other hand, Turkish internet users mostly struggles with uploading, downloading, chat and social networks. Maybe this proves the big numbers in Facebook, Msn Messenger and file hosting sites. Another interesting result of internet (non) usage is 20% of candidates don’t use internet and don’t think to use in the future.

Now, let’s have a look in the results of the mobile&fixed line statistics. A big amount of people have both mobile and fixed lines. For example, in India and South Africa, most people only use mobile phones. Maybe in Turkey, fixed line usage can be traditional. As a very easy example, a Turkish family immediately fixes a line after moving to their new house. But at the same time, mobile usage is on the tops. 97% of people talk on the phone and 63% of them send a SMS at least one time a day and average durations and numbers are increasing continuously.

What about mobile broadband ? Only 19% of people know what 3G is. However, half of these people are eager to use mobile services every day. And the propensity shows that mobile broadband will be much more used than fixed broadband.

All these results show that here in Turkey, there’s a great market potential of mobile services. People are willing to use it if the services are user-friendly, easy to understand and cheap or free. As the VoIP is more and more in our lives, soon SMS / Voice will not be the money earning areas. With the help of 3G, 4G, WİMAX, LTE, etc. solutions, value added services and the providers of these services will be on the stage. These developments will also change the way of doing business. If we analyse the youth potential of Turkey and the demand of using mobile&internet services, we can feel the excitement about the more connected, faster, more flexible and converged country.

ps: You can download the whole report HERE (Turkish version) : Ericsson Consumer Lab Turkey 2008