Clear Digital Digest: Uber, Apple and Ofcom

This week saw Ofcom release their always useful and insightful annual UK media review: Adults Media Use and Attributes 2016.  At over 200 pages, there is a huge wealth of detail to take in at once, but this report can prove an invaluable one stop shop over the year for many must have stats.  A good place to start is the report overview which pulls out 4 major trends, with the ever moving shift to smartphone usage unsurprisingly to the fore:

1. There has been a sizeable increase in the proportion of internet users saying they only use websites or apps that they’ve used before (42% v 31% in 2014).
2. There has been a considerable rise (from 6% in 2014 to 16% in 2015) in the proportion of adults who only use smartphones or tablets to go online, and not a PC/laptop.
3. There is an increasing preference for mobile phones above more traditional media devices (with mobile phones now replacing TVs as the device adults say they would miss most, as shown in the table below).
4. There is increasing polarity between different age groups in terms of communications activity.

Mobile phones would now be more missed than TV by all age groups up to 55. Source: Ofcom

I spent yesterday at the Internet Retailing Expo and these trends around shifting device usage were resonating loud and clear from some of my discussions there plus presentations attended; I’ll be blogging more thoughts on this next week.  Returning to the Ofcom report, I’d recommend a couple of other interesting summaries:

• Econsultancy looking at five key findings for marketers from the report.
• The Drum’s column pointing out that the Ofcom data challenges some current stereotypes used in marketing (for example the often understated importance of over 50s online)

Some diverging results statements from the internet’s big beasts this week.  Although widely trailed before, it was still strangely odd to see Apple report its first fall in sales since 2003 on Tuesday, with sales of quarterly sales of $50.6bn down from $58bn in the same quarter last year.  This was primarily due to a slowdown in iPhone sales (which account for 65% of Apple’s revenue) to 51.2m in the quarter from 61.2m the year before.  This of course led to a wealth of think pieces on what Apple needs to do to turn this decline around (spoiler alert: it is unlikely to be the Apple Watch), while I did enjoy this “brief guide to everything that’s annoying about Apple” – my personal favourites being numbers 5 and 11. 

iPhone revenue dwarfs all other Apple divisions. Image source: The Guardian

Meanwhile, Amazon has just posted its fourth straight profitable quarter in a row, and the largest quarterly profit in its history, prompting Wired to exclaim “Whoa, Amazon Isn’t Just Making Money. It’s Making More Than Ever”.  Amazon’s Q1 net profit stood at $513m with global revenue of $29.1bn, up 28% on last year and beating analysts’ expectations, leading to a share price increase of over 12%.   It’s worth stating here that Amazon spent years incurring losses as it built its huge empire (including its increasingly important AWS cloud computing arm which saw revenue up 64% YOY to $2.6bn), but has now posted ever growing profit growth for the 4 quarters of the last year; a development sure to please investors but also demonstrating that Amazon seems to be entering its next phase of maturity. 

​Finally, the Guardian this week published an excellent article on “how Uber conquered London”.  A fairly lengthy read but some really enlightening insights on how Uber launched in London, plus its future plans: a must read for anyone interested in the start-up world, or just catches the odd taxi here and there.