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Smartphone owners are placing traditional voice calls less frequently as they ramp up their use of social networking, text messaging, and other alternative means of communication.

A growing number of smartphone owners are skipping traditional voice calls in favor of emerging methods of communication, a shift that reflects the plethora of ways people can connect.

“At first, we used mobile phones just for placing traditional phone calls,” says Paul Lee, head of global technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) research at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (Deloitte Global). “However, the past decade has brought a massive escalation of communications options.”

Among the novel choices for mobile device communications, Lee says, are social networking, instant messaging, mobile email, text messaging, and a range of apps. Moreover, individuals who wish to make calls using their mobile phones can initiate video rather than voice calls and use Voice over Internet Protocol, which places voice calls over the data network.

As a result of these expanding options, Deloitte Global predicts that by the end of 2016, 26 percent of smartphone owners in developed markets will not use these devices for traditional phone calls in a given week. This compares to 22 percent of all smartphone users in 2015 and 11 percent in 2012, when the base of smartphone users was much smaller.¹

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 18- to 24-year-olds are the most inclined to abandon voice calling. “It’s not that members of this group have stopped communicating. They are just using their mobile phones to communicate via other means, such as instant messaging, email, and social networking,” Lee says.

In this TMT Predictions 2016 video, Lee and Duncan Stewart, director of TMT research for Deloitte Canada, examine the reasons behind the increasing number of “data-exclusive” smartphone users.

1. The percentage of “data exclusives” for 2012-2015 has been extracted from Deloitte’s Global Mobile Consumer Survey for selected developed markets. The following countries have been considered for 2014 and 2015: Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain, U.K., and U.S. Australia, Italy, and Norway did not participate in the 2012 and 2013 editions. Netherlands and Singapore did not participate in the 2012 edition.

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