Everything you can imagine is already within reach with your thumb. From weekly shopping to applying for a mortgage in just a few minutes. The possibilities that smartphones offer today have multiplied unimaginably in just five years. And it seems that they have struck a chord with most of the public. According to a study by Hootsuite and We Are Social, the typical digital user is already connected to the internet for an average of seven hours a day. That’s the equivalent of 48 hours a week staring at a screen. At the end of the year about 2,500 hours. Most of the time – three hours and 45 minutes – is spent in front of the cell phone. So much so that digital investment in the mobile sector has skyrocketed worldwide in recent years, especially since the outbreak of the pandemic. According to data from Rocket Lab, a mobile marketing advertising technology company, $339,000 million was invested in mobile platforms worldwide in 2022, and the forecast is that this number will exceed 542,890 million in 2026. In Europe the sector moved 88,000 million euros, in Spain the value of operations amounted to 12 billion.
Santiago Campos is Sales Director of Rocket Lab in Spain, an adtech company born in Mexico in 2019 – advertising on digital platforms and applications. From his office in Madrid, he relies on data and statistics to explain the growth of this sector. especially with regard to the last three years. “85% of the time we use a mobile device is through applications. They already represent 50% of global investments in digital advertising and are expected to exceed 60% in less than four years.” Although the uncertainty caused by the war in Ukraine and inflation led to some decline in investments in the Last year, it is expected that between the end of this year and 2024 the spirit of uncertainty will finally disappear and an unprecedented recovery will occur. “We experienced a decline of between 5% and 7% between 2021 and 2022, but the trend this year and the forecasts for next year point to a recovery that will far exceed the slight decline of recent months.”
“When we examine the trends, we find that 90.4% of Spanish users access the Internet via their mobile phone. “This shows how important it is for Spanish companies to have a mobile first vision and invest in the mobile ecosystem,” says Juan Echeverría, CEO and co-founder of Rocket Lab. 40% of online purchases are already made through applications on smartphones. According to a study published by this adtech, last year 76% of Spanish users made purchases via their mobile phones. A number that reached just 56% in 2017 and drops to 25% in 2014.
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The three economic sectors with the greatest growth in recent months were mobility, food delivery, fashion and financial services. “Fintech is growing rapidly. “Traditional banking is trying to jump on the bandwagon, but cannot compete with digital native companies that are experiencing unprecedented growth rates,” says Santiago Campos. According to Adjust, a digital analytics consultancy specializing in application growth, Spain ranks 16th in the world for investment in marketing apps. “We are seeing more and more banks, e-commerce platforms or distribution companies that were traditionally focused on web commerce giving priority to the app market. In Spain there is also the gaming market [juegos] It gains a lot of power. “It is probably the sector where there is the most money at the moment,” says Carmen Benito, Adjust’s head of southern Europe. In 2022, the three most downloaded video game applications in the world – Subway Surfers, Stumble Guys and Roblox – were downloaded a total of 696 million times.
Investments in the textile sector have also skyrocketed. “Fashion app usage increased 27.6% last year compared to the previous year,” says Isabel G. Benayas, analyst at Smartme Analytics, a customer tracking and digital audience measurement platform. According to the “Mobile App Trends” study, of all e-commerce applications worldwide – including Amazon, Shopee and Alibaba – Shein from the Chinese cheap clothing giant was the most downloaded last year with 229 million. The second company was Meesho, which offers high-quality clothing and home products at the lowest wholesale prices with 209 million downloads. The most cautious sectors, says Benito, are healthcare and insurance companies. “They still haven’t found a way to make the apps truly useful for the service they offer. In the medical field, for example, there are great advances in technology development in many areas, but people are not investing in the app market and have not yet found the formula to be able to use them.”
According to Benito, paid applications are becoming cheaper and subscription methods are gaining importance over one-time payments. “Users are increasingly willing to use services that are not free. This is because companies offer applications with higher quality services. The plans for a few days without pay to show the value they offer are working better and better.”
The direct revenue forecast for 2023 is $200,000 million worldwide. “As with any monthly fee, if the user has a recurring payment obligation for a good service, they will eventually use it. In this way, companies ensure a knowledgeable audience that invests more time and money than before.”
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