Azerbaijan, Baku, 8 April / Trend corr S. Babayeva/ According to the European GSM Association, which represents over 700 GSM operators, the number of GSM subscribers is 2.81bln worldwide.
| World | 2,881,123,146 |
| 265,076,453 (9%) | |
| 297,393,161 (10%) | |
| Asian Pacific Region | 1,162,251,880 (40%) |
| 397,925,950 (14%) | |
| 478,833,084 (17%) | |
| 173,200,146 (6%) | |
| USA/Canada | 106,442,472 (4%) |
According to the Association which was established in 1987, the mobile communication operators spent $234bln to create GSM networks, and there are 2.6bln GSM connections worldwide, make a total of 1.2mln new GSM connections per day. Therefore GSM networks covers over 80% of the population. The Association described China, India and Russia as the largest mobile communication markets.
According to the Association, the number of mobile connections in the world will amount to $4bln by the first quarter of 2010 and the annual expenditure for mobile communication announcements will comprise $14bln by 2010.
There are three GSM operators in Azerbaijan and the number of subscribers exceeds 4mln.