Group product manager Anthony Sullivan says overall, smartphones and tablets account for nearly 35% of traffic

"Mobile is having a huge transformational effect not only on how our audience seek out content, but how they're discovering it," says Anthony Sullivan, group product manager for Guardian Core products at Guardian News & Media.

Sullivan was speaking at the Guardian Mobile Business Summit 2012 conference in London, where he provided some stats on how people are accessing Guardian products – its website, mobile website and native apps – on mobile phones and tablets.

"The way we've organised ourselves reflects that we put mobile really at the centre of our planning," said Sullivan, revealing that at the start of 2011, mobile devices accounted for just over 10% of visits to core Guardian products, but less than two years later, that's closer to 30%.

"That's just mobile handsets," added Sullivan. "Once you add tablets on top, that jumps to closer to 35%, and it's in tablets we're seeing the most rapid growth at the moment."

Sullivan said that 94% of tablet visits to Guardian products are on Apple's iPad, but that he expects this to change "pretty quickly" in the months ahead, thanks to the release of new, high-profile Android and Windows 8 tablets.

Sullivan also addressed the question of when mobile visits will overtake desktop visits to Guardian products. He suggested that tipping point is still around two years away, but noted that at certain times of day, it's already happened.

Sullivan showed this chart:

At some times of day, mobile visits overtake desktop for Guardian products

"If you look between 6am and 7am in the morning, we're now getting more visits coming from mobile devices," he said. "On Saturdays at 3pm when the Premier League is in full flight, we also have more mobile devices than desktop."

That is starting to have an impact on the way The Guardian commissions, in order to ensure the early-morning visitors are finding lots of relevant content.

"We ran some trials through the Olympic Games with morning Olympics-focused briefings. You'll see more of that in the months to come," said Sullivan.

He added that The Guardian is seeing an overall rise in the amount of news being consumed by its readers – they're using mobile devices as well as desktop computers, not instead of them.

"The big challenge we have is how to monetise that," he said, anticipating the obvious follow-up question to all this data.

More stats: 65% of The Guardian's mobile activity is taking place over Wi-Fi rather than cellular networks – "it's not just out about, it's people at home, and even in bed!" – but it's fragmented in terms of devices.

Last week, 1,857 different mobile handset models accessed Guardian content, although rather less – around 36 handsets – drove a significant audience to the sites and apps.

The Guardian is about to launch a new responsive version of its website, which can currently be accessed on a mobile device at beta.guardian.co.uk.

"Our real focus was on speed," said Sullivan about the new site's advantages. "It's significantly faster than the [mobile] version that's currently available."