(By Balachander) Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) said roughly 40 percent of all phones sold were smartphones for the third quarter, in which data traffice doubled.
The communications technology company expects the growth of smartphone data traffic to exceed the overall average and data traffic to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 50 percent between 2012 and 2018, driven mainly by video.
The online video is the biggest contributor to mobile traffic volumes, constituting 25 percent of total smartphone traffic and 40 percent of total tablet traffic, the company said in its Ericsson Mobility report.
Ericsson expects mobile subscriptions to reach 6.6 billion by the end of 2012 and 9.3 billion by the end of 2018.
China accounted for about 35 percent of net additions during the third quarter, followed by Brazil (9 million), Indonesia (7 million), and the Philippines (5 million).
Ericsson noted that global mobile penetration reached 91 percent in the quarter, and mobile subscriptions now total around 6.4 billion. Mobile subscriptions have grown by around 9 percent year-on-year and 2 percent on a sequential basis.
U.S.-listed shares of the Swedish company ended at $8.59 on Tuesday.