Armenia, Nigeria led Mobile Web Growth in 2008

Opera’s State of the Mobile Web presents the statistics for mobile web usage from January 2008 to January 2009 – and the fastest growing mobile web countries are Armenia (with over 2800% growth), followed by Nigeria (with 1854% growth).

According to the report, which is based on usage of the extremely popular Opera Mini browser for mobile phones, other notable countries include: Egypt (1391%), Philippines (570%) and Kazakhstan (419%).

Nigeria is still not in the top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage (ranked by # of unique users). Here’s that list:

1. Russia
2. Indonesia
3. Ukraine
4. China
5. India
6. South Africa
7. United States
8. United Kingdom
9. Poland
10. Germany

But at the current growth rate that Nigeria is pushing, it shouldn’t be long before the West African country shows up on the Top 10 list – and probably climb all the way to the top. Nigeria is currently number 12 on the Top 35 countries (unique users) list.

With a huge chunk of the country’s geographical mass now being covered by fast-growing GSM networks, internet access has reached many hitherto unreachable places for the first time in Nigeria.

And with more people owning and/or having access to mobile phones than PCs, the mobile internet is set to be the next big thing in the country. Nigeria has a population of over 150 million people, most of whom have no access yet to the internet.

The full report is available at: Opera: State of the Mobile Web report.