3G penetration in Germany will exceed 60% by 2012, with revenues from data services on mobile devices, not including those from SMS and MMS, expected to more than triple from 1.6 billion (1.3 billion) in 2007, to 5.7 billion in 2012. Data Services will be the  main driver for the mobile Internet.
These are some of the key findings from a report just released by media consultancy Goldmedia, Mobile Life 2012, which analyses the German market.

With a population of 82 million, Germany is Europes biggest telecommunications market. At 125%, the mobile phone penetration rate in Germany is one of the highest in Europe. Mobile subscriptions have doubled within the last seven years. While the number of subscribers continues to grow, total mobile revenues are decreasing. Average mobile revenue per user (ARPU) has declined to 16.80 per month, one third less than the ARPU figure for 2002.
Voice telephony is still important, the report notes, but data services will catch up strongly during the coming years. Goldmedia forecasts that such services will make up 20% of mobile revenues by the end of 2008 across Western Europe.
Mobile video, mobile games, mobile music and mobile advertising alone will reach a market volume of around 740 million by 2012 in Germany, says Goldmedia Managing Direcotr, Klaus Goldhammer. Mobile entertainment will account for about 13% of total revenue generated by data services.
A large proportion of mobile entertainment will be financed by mobile advertising, the report says. Revenue from ads on mobile devices is expected to triple to almost 300 million by 2012, compared with 96.9 million forecast for 2008.
Mobile Internet penetration in Germany lags behind other European countries. Despite the fact that 26 million Germans own an Internet-ready mobile phone, only 7.4% of  mobile phone owners in Germany use the mobile Internet, compared to 12.9% in the UK and 11.9% in Italy. In the US, the figure is 15.6%.
Reasons for the reluctance to adopt mobile Internet in Germany include the unattractive price models offered by the mobile networks; inadequate equipment; slow site loading times and a lack of user-friendliness and others.
You can download a copy of the PDF, complete with charts, for free, here.