Asia-Pacific's mobile baseline still rests on one analyst's model

The figure or the record

GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the mobile operators' industry body GSMA, publishes an annual regional report titled The Mobile Economy Asia Pacific. Its 2024 edition states that by the end of 2023, 1.8 billion people in Asia Pacific, 63% of the region's population, subscribed to a mobile service, and that 51% of the population, about 1.4 billion people, used mobile internet, almost triple the figure a decade earlier. The same report states that mobile technologies and services generated $880 billion of economic value in Asia Pacific in 2023, equal to 5.3% of regional GDP, and that smartphone adoption across the region stood at 78% in 2023, which GSMA Intelligence forecasts will rise to 94% by 2030. The report's current landing page, now describing a newer 2026 edition, confirms this is an annually updated series rather than a one-off study.

What the documents establish

The report separates a measured base year, 2023, from a forecast horizon, 2030, and labels each accordingly: subscriber penetration, mobile internet use, smartphone adoption and the $880 billion economic-contribution figure are all stated as 2023 figures, while the 70% subscriber-penetration and 94% smartphone-adoption figures for 2030 are explicitly forecasts built on GSMA Intelligence's own modelling. The landing page's shift to a 2026 edition establishes that this 2024 report is one snapshot in a running series, not a static reference.

Scope and caveats

These are regional aggregates across a highly uneven set of markets, from Bangladesh and Pakistan to Japan and South Korea, and the report itself breaks smartphone adoption down by country precisely because the regional average obscures large gaps: Pakistan's 2023 smartphone adoption is far below Asia Pacific's 78% average, while South Korea's sits well above it. None of the figures in this report concern short-form drama, coin pricing or video-app monetisation; they describe the connectivity and device base a market for any of those would sit on top of, not the market itself.

What to watch

This is editorial: the useful comparison is not this report's own 2030 forecast but whether the newer editions it points to keep the same country-level smartphone-adoption gaps, which would show whether the region's device base is converging or staying uneven.

• Does the 2026 edition of this report show smartphone adoption gaps between countries narrowing or widening?
• Do any short-drama analysts publish download or revenue figures normalised against this report's country-level device data?
• Does mobile internet penetration in the region's lower-adoption markets catch up to the 2023 regional average?

This is a connectivity and economic-contribution baseline, carefully dated and forecast-labelled by its own publisher, and nothing more. Any short-drama market claim for Asia Pacific still has to be built, and checked, against a base this specific rather than a single regional percentage.