Mobile penetration tops 100% in most markets

The Sun

a day ago

KUALA LUMPUR: Mobile penetration now exceeds 100% in nearly every market, with Hong Kong SAR at 264%, Singapore at 150%, Taiwan region at 145%, Japan and South Korea each at 140%, Malaysia at 130%, and Mainland China at 110%.
Even in emerging markets like Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and India, penetration sits at or above 110%.
This hyper-connectivity is driving a new kind of customer behaviour: consumers move fluidly between super-apps like LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Zalo, Viber and WhatsApp – sometimes switching platforms mid-conversation, and expect brands to follow them across channels with instant, context-aware, and culturally relevant responses.
This was revealed by Infobip, the global cloud communications platform, in its latest report – The AI Advantage: How Leading Brands Thrive in a 24x7 Customer World – that provides fresh insights into how Asia-Pacific's hyper-digital consumers are reshaping expectations for always-on engagement, and how artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming the only way for brands to keep up.
The IDC-backed research underpinning the Infobip report reveals that 43% of Asia-Pacific businesses cite improving customer experience as their single biggest operational challenge, hampered by siloed data, disconnected channel strategies, and the cost of delivering round-the-clock support across dozens of markets, languages, and regulatory environments.
To address these challenges, the report highlights the growing role of AI technologies including generative AI, agentic AI, and conversational AI, in helping brands simplify operations and deliver connected, real-time experiences across every customer touchpoint.
'The conversation around AI for customer engagement across Asia-Pacific has fundamentally shifted from 'if' to 'how' — 'how deeply and how quickly'. The 'always-on' customer now has a baseline expectation of instant gratification, which traditional business models cannot simply scale to meet. Hence, the new competitive frontier is not just about having AI but about orchestrating advanced capabilities such as generative AI and agentic AI, to craft proactive customer journeys that build lasting customer relationships,' stated IDC Asia-Pacific senior research director Nikhil Batra.
Infobip VP revenue Velid Begovic said, 'Asia-Pacific isn't just mobile-first. It's mobile-saturated. People here live their lives across five or six different messaging apps, and they don't think twice about jumping between them. They expect brands to jump with them, and that creates a zero-wait mindset where they don't want to be queued, redirected, or asked to repeat themselves. Unfortunately, the reality is that businesses can't meet that standard with outdated systems. Even early AI efforts like basic chatbots with no access to customer history miss the mark in delivering the hyper-personalised service today's customers expect. AI has gone from an experiment to the engine room of customer experience.'
IDC predicts that by 2028, consumers across the region are expected to spend US$32 billion via AI agents that run independently on their smartphones to programmatically shop for goods, services and consider purchases.
Businesses are racing to respond, with companies projected to invest over US$30 billion (RM127 billion) in AI infrastructure and platforms by 2027 to deliver the kind of personalised, always-on service customers now take for granted. According to IDC, enterprise AI investment in customer service and marketing across Asia-Pacific is growing at a compound annual rate of 35% through 2029, reflecting the scale and urgency of transformation. By 2028, 40% of mid-tier B2C brands in the region will be using autonomous AI agents to offer 'white glove' levels of service once reserved for luxury customers.
'What we're seeing now is a step change. AI is more than just an FAQ-answering tool. It's an agentic AI coordinating a product exchange across messaging channels without a single manual handoff. It's a generative AI composing a message that feels like it was written for one person, in their language, with their cultural nuance. Our job at Infobip is to take those possibilities and make them real for brands, giving them the infrastructure and local expertise to turn 24/7 engagement from a buzzword into a business advantage,' said Begovic.
Infobip is at the centre of this transformation, powering businesses with its Conversational Experience Orchestration Platform (CXOP) – a solution that places agentic AI at the heart of every customer interaction. CXOP unifies messaging, automation, and AI-powered assistance within a single, intelligent platform that adapts to behaviour, sentiment, and intent in real time. This solution sets a new standard, one where brands and users engage in intelligent, meaningful, and outcome-driven conversations.