eMarketer: 2013 is the year of the social smartphone in Latin America

The region will have 145.6 million smartphone users this year

Infrastructure upgrades, telecom regulation reforms and falling data prices combined to make 2013 the year of the smartphone in Latin America. Last year, the smartphone market added a record 35.4 million new users -- 45.35 million -- eMarketer predicts. While it will be hard to top last year's growth, the region's smartphones will continue to see strong double-digit growth through 2017.

eMarketer predicts that the smartphone user base in Latin America will grow by 28.3% in 2014, led by Brazil (36.0%) and three major economies including Chile, Colombia, Colombia and Venezuela. The growth rate will continue to slow by 2017, mainly due to the expansion of the market size.

Although the growth rate will slow, it will not translate into a significant decline in the number of new smartphone users in the region. eMarketer predicts that more than 3,000 new smartphone users will be added each year until 2017. In absolute terms, Brazil and Mexico will be the markets that contribute the most to the expansion of smartphone users in Latin America, adding 10.9 million and 6.1 million users respectively in 2014.

From now on, Brazil’s population size, combined with a rush of infrastructure upgrades ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, will drive rapid growth in smartphone users in the country (much faster than in other markets). We forecast that by 2017, the country will have 70.5 million smartphone users.

However, the combined growth of regions outside the top three will eclipse markets such as Brazil. eMarketer predicts that from 2012 to 2017, the combined compound annual growth rate of smartphone users in these regions will be higher (27.0%), compared to Argentina (18.1%), Brazil (26.7%), and Mexico (24.3%), and by 2017, the total number of smartphone users in the region will be close to 100 million.

Meanwhile, Argentina’s smartphone growth will be limited by policies to reduce imports of high-tech products and to incentivize manufacturers to increase local content. This measure is not related to production, but has inadvertently pushed up smartphone prices and reduced the diversity of devices in the market.

Despite these obstacles, Argentina will remain the third largest smartphone market in the region. Although the country’s smartphone growth rate is lower than the rest of Latin America’s forecast, it will still double in 2017, reaching 18.4 million smartphone users.