Due to a rising middle class in the emerging countries, there has been a rising demand of the latest gadgets and online media activities while Internet users in the US and other mature markets are loosing their edge.

According to reports by Accenture, the top consumer electronics owned by US Internet users were computers and mobile phones, with web-enabled mobile phone usage increasing more than 300% in the past 3 years. Mobile phone and web-enabled smartphones taken together become the most important consumer technology to Americans.

Web users surveyed in emerging countries such as China, India, Malaysia and Singapore were ahead of mature markets such as the US, Germany, France and Japan in areas such as:

• “Emerging-market Web users were more than two and one-half times as likely to buy a smartphone during the next year (52%) compared with mature-market respondents (20%), and were also more likely to have bought a smartphone in the past year (67% versus 32%).

• Internet users in emerging markets were twice as likely to have bought a computer in the past year (40% versus 20%).

• Emerging-market respondents tended to spend more money on consumer electronics in 2009 than their mature-market counterparts.”

In addition emerging markets are showing more usage of Web activities than mature markets in areas such as – watching tv shows/movies on the Internet or mobile, working from home, managing photos and videos on the Internet, connecting with people on social networking sites, and blogging.

“One of the reasons for this emerging-country growth is the rapid expansion of the middle class with its substantial disposable income,” says Jean-Laurent Poitou, managing director of Accenture’s Electronics & High Tech industry group.

Written By: Sam Kim
Information Provided By: eMarketer