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Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report highlights declining smartphone shipments, 51% of the world now online, much more

Mary Meeker has presented her 2019 Internet Trends Report today during Recode’s Code Conference. The annual report offers a comprehensive look at trends including smartphone shipments, new Internet users and usage, e-commerce, and much more.

This year’s annual Internet Trends report includes 333 slides covering users, e-commerce + advertising, usage, freemium business models, data growth, work, education, immigration, healthcare, and China.

First in the report, Meeker highlights that the growth of global Internet users is “solid,” but slowing down. The data shows that 3.8 billion people are now online, representing 51% of the world.

However, 2018 saw a slight drop in growth to 6% for the year, compared to 7% YoY growth in 2017. The report predicts that the growth of new Internet users will continue to slow down.

The next major trend the report features is the tough time that many smartphone manufacturers saw in 2018. While 2017 smartphone shipments were stagnant at 0% growth, 2018 saw a 4% decline.

Recode has summarized some of the other notable findings in this year’s Internet Trends report including:

  • As of last week, seven out of 10 of the world’s most valuable companies by market cap are tech companies, with only Berkshire Hathaway, Visa, and Johnson & Johnson making the Top 10 as non-tech companies
  • E-commerce is now 15 percent of retail sales. Its growth has slowed — up 12.4 percent in Q1 compared with a year earlier — but still towers over growth in regular retail, which was just 2 percent in Q1.
  • Images are increasingly the means by which people communicate, as technology developments like faster wifi and better phone cameras have encouraged a surge in image taking. More than 50 percent of Twitter impressions now involve posts with images, video or other media; Twitter used to be text-only.
  • Health care is steadily becoming more digitized. Expect more telemedicine and on-demand consultations.

The report also notes that digital media consumption was up in the US during 2018 with Americans spending an average of 6.3 hours on it each day, up 7% YoY.

You can check out the full 300+ slide deck for all the trends and details.

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