The full guide to Southeast Asia’s digital landscape in 2017

For anyone exploring digital opportunities, Southeast Asia should be somewhere near the top of your list; connectivity is growing at an impressive rate throughout the region. But with just 53 percent of the population online today, there’s still plenty of room for further growth.

As you can see in the presentation embedded above, the recent Digital in 2017: Southeast Asia report that I published in partnership with Hootsuite and We Are Social outlines the key statistics and trends for every country across the region. (Click here for a larger format on SlideShare.)

I thought it might be handy to go beyond that country-level data, though, and share some regional overviews too.

You won’t find the charts featured below in any of the presentations we’ve published so far, so this is all juicy new content. Having said that, please feel free to download these new images and use them wherever you choose. (Just say a quick thank you to @wearesocial and @hootsuite on Twitter for their generosity.)

The regional picture

All key digital indicators grew at an impressive rate across Southeast Asia over the past year, with mobile social media use, in particular posting some very impressive gains.

Internet use

More than half of Southeast Asia’s population now uses the internet, with the number of internet users in the region growing by more than 30 percent or 80 million new users in the past 12 months alone.

Mobile internet use appears to be driving much of this growth, although mobile internet penetration hasn’t quite hit the halfway point yet. The current pace of growth suggests that we’ll likely pass that milestone in the next few months, though, with most new internet users in the region now mobile-first and often mobile-only.

Given the diversity of economic development around Southeast Asia, though, it’s perhaps not surprising that digital connectivity isn’t evenly distributed across the region’s 11 countries.

Social media use

Mobile connectivity