Romania: Internet & Mobile Market Size

One of the most important questions that investors or business managers ask about when a new venture or a business opportunity is about to be launched is the question about the market size. How big is your projected market size? Most of the times, this question is quite tricky, because there’s a huge difference between measuring (estimating, rather) the number of individuals who would buy a mobile phone or the number of individuals willing to buy a mobile phone online.

I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs working on new online business ideas who actually had no idea about their target market, not to mention its estimated size. I find this strange, because we always had numbers related to the Internet, as well as the mobile market size in Romania. Yes, segmenting these numbers to the niches that one or another are interested about, it’s a different discussion, but at least the general digital market size is known.

Ionut has recently mentioned the size of the o****nline Romanian market as being 8.3 mil users, citing Google Ad Planner numbers. This is a bit more than 1/3 of the total population of Romania, which was estimated at around 21.5 mil people in 2008, as well as more than the last numbers cited in 2008, which were 7.5 mil Internet users.

In terms of mobile users, the situation is quite different. VoxLine announced recently the ANCOM numbers for Romania and the results are impressive: we have 28.6 mil mobile users, out of which 24.5 mil active sim cards. Of course, we cannot really have more mobile users than population in Romania, thus these numbers are actually attributed to about 16 mil unique mobile users.

Despite the fact that the mobile market is twice the size of the Internet market, mobile marketing in Romania is still in a very incipient stage, even more so as compared to online marketing. The interesting thing is that, despite the numbers showing quite a significant Internet and mobile market in Romania, advertisers are still reluctant to move some of their advertising budgets on these channels, although they are better performers than the traditional media channels (more measurable, thus better ROI).

Just think about how you are startled every time your mobile phone rings or vibrates. We almost always rush to pick up the phone and check out who has contacted us, be it via voice call, SMS, MMS or e-mail. There is no other medium that has such a powerful customer journey interruption, and maybe this is also one of the reasons while mobile marketing is so sensitive.

Anyways, the idea is that these media channels are here, are measurable, are reachable, perform well and are all yours to take advantage of. Some of your competitors have already taken advantage, and thus you should be at least considering these channels for your marketing budget. If I were to talk about the automotive market, I can tell you Jaguar has been the first automotive company targeting me via an MMS.