Demographic Analysis for Consumer Spend in Communications

Dominant demographic factors in mobile network investment analysis are: population density, income, mobile penetration and mobile activity. On a global scale income variations and population densities are very large. Higher income is available in cities while rural incomes remain very small. In a low income market people tend to think that a call is an investment creating instant benefit. This leads to an assumption that the consumer spend behavior is a zero sum game where the money used for communications is not available to other consumption. It was assumed that these trends would be visible in macro economical studies of spend patterns in different countries and demographic environments. This paper first creates a global view to consumer spending and analyses how much income is spend to communications in different demographic conditions. In second part of the paper demographic analysis is focused on South Africa where understanding of demographic conditions is a necessity for successful investments especially in rural area.