The rapid growth in the global telecommunications space definitely looks good on paper. As per data released by GSMA Intelligence for the first quarter of 2016, the total number of mobile connections (including machine-to-machine) worldwide stood at 7,747,629,404 and the number of unique mobile subscribers stood at 3,819,504,999. Meanwhile, revenue per year (for the financial year 2014) stood at a staggering $1.06 tn, a 1.99% YOY growth. However, if we examine some of the parameters closely, we will find some alarming trends rearing their heads quite recently. For example, the number of SIM cards per unique subscriber, has been growing steadily every quarter. As perGSMA Intelligence, in the fourth quarter of 2014, each unique subscriber across the world had 1.80 SIM cards. This number fell to 1.79 from the first to the fourth quarter of 2015, to reach 1.80 once again in the first quarter of 2016. Going forward, the firm has predicted that this number will remain steady, at least until the second quarter of this year. Thereafter, it is expected to rise to 1.81 in the third quarter of this year, where it will remain until the fourth quarter of 2017.
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