The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be

My advice for the new year: go East and South, young man and woman ... and investor. America, Europe, and Japan are stagnant and ponderous. More and more, in the coming years, the real moving and shaking will happen elsewhere. "2011 will be the year Android explodes!" cried a recent headline , citing a new Broadcom chipset that will reportedly make sub-$100 unsubsidized smartphones ubiquitous. Maybe so, but I second MG's skepticism : North American carriers will fight this tooth and nail, and even when they lose, we'll still have to wait for the three-year contracts that are status quo here to finally die. If that chipset is real, though, the headline's not wrong; Android will explode ... in the developing world, where virtually all phone service is pre-paid. (As, ahem, I predicted 20 months ago .) There's a larger trend here. Mobile phones and 3G service became ubiquitous in Africa so rapidly in part because they never had to compete with landlines. Kenyans flocked to mobile-phone money transfer services, because they had no consumer banks: now M-Pesa, the largest, handles money equal to a mindboggling 10% of Kenya's GDP every year. (The US equivalent would be $1.4 trillion /year. By contrast, PayPal handles less than $100 billion/year worldwide, of which mobile-phone payments are but a small fraction.)