It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a substantial portion of the world population is using mobile devices to access Web. For IT managers this means that they have to allocate money for projects to develop mobile versions of their Web applications to avoid losing customers. But how many customers could you potentially lose? Let’s look at some numbers offered by the statcounter.com

Generating the graph for the Worldwide region shows that 12% of the Web usage is done via mobile devices. So if you are running global Internet operations this number represents the potential number of customers that you might lose unless your business is accessible from smartphones. This number is pretty impressive, isn’t it?

But what about businesses whose customers live in the USA, a technologically advanced country? Changing the region to USA shows that only 11% are accessing Web online. We are lagging behind. What about the leaders of the European Union? In both Germany and France only about 5.5% access WEB from smartphones. An infamous Greece has only 3% of mobile Web users. China shows 5.7%, Israel – 5.5%.

So who should be heavily investing into development of the mobile solutions? I’ll tell you in a minute. If your customers live in India, you must immediately start moving your Web apps to the mobile space: 53% of Indians are Web surfing from the mobile devices vs. 47% that are still using desktops. Surprised? Turkmenistan show the same numbers. In Zimbabwe 48% browse Web from mobile phones.

Conclusion. Some countries with poor economies have missed the PC revolution, but they are trying to catch up in the mobile space. Unfortunately, the chances are slim that losing them as customers will harm your business. So get the statistics for your region of interest while working on the IT budget for the next fiscal year. But keep in mind, that 10% is a pretty substantial number already, and it’ll only grow.