Smaato: South-East Asia is a $1.5 billion powerhouse for mobile advertising

Mobile ad optimisation specialist Smaato has proclaimed South-East Asia as a new powerhouse of the industry, claiming marketeers should look to Japan and China when looking to target masses of consumers.

Detailed in a white paper written by Nick Lane, chief analyst at research agency MobileSquared, Smaato claims more than 400 million people across the region will have access to the mobile internet in 2010, each generating 26 page impressions per day.

As a result, users in Asia will produce 15 billion page impressions on a daily basis, with Japan and China both taking a large slice of the cake.

Super spending spree

With such a large base to target, Smaato believes total mobile advertising spending will hit around $1.5 billion for the year.

"The Asia-Pacific region shows a huge potential for growth in the mobile advertising space," says Smaato CEO and co-founder Ragnar Kruse.

"We are proud to have established a Singapore presence in 2009 and will continue to hire to grow our local team. As the Smaato Metrics and this white paper show this is a complex market which has its own rules and requirements."

On the down-low

However, the white paper also points out that, despite having a large number of consumers with access to the mobile internet, converting that traffic is not straightforward.

Smaato surmises that currently only 8 percent of all such traffic is converted into mobile advertising inventory.

Additionally, many of the hundreds of devices available in the region run on 2G networks.

Smaato concludes, "The growth of the smartphone market share will eventually bring relief to the problem of handset fragmentation but it will be a slow process."

The white paper can be downloaded for free from Smaato's website.