More people will soon browse the internet from a mobile device than from a traditional desktop or laptop, but most brands have yet to prepare for this change.

This week a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB) of the top 100 UK consumer brands, a list that includes companies like Tesco and Boots, found that nearly 40 per cent had a mobile website.

While this leaves a significant majority still not 'mobile ready', research by PMLiVE found that big pharma lags even further behind.

Just two of the top ten pharmaceutical companies currently have a mobile version of their corporate '.com' website, despite these sites being among firms' most important communications channel.

On these terms, the only companies within big pharma's upper echelon who are mobile ready are Pfizer, with a solidly functional mobile website, and Abbott, which has taken a more designed approach.

But this means that companies like Novartis and Roche, both of whom earned praise for their website effectiveness in a study earlier this year, have yet to address trend towards mobile browsing beyond launching mobile apps.

Outside the largest big pharma companies, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bayer and Shire have mobile sites.

However, although Bayer's comes in German and English version, the company's full website launches unless you specifically search for the mobile equivalent, while Shire's site seems restricted to a hard-to-find mini-site for investors.

Mobile browsing is expected to overtake that done on traditional desktops and laptops during 2013, according to predictions by analysts at ComScore in June, and this has already happened in China.

Although these figures include tablet devices, where some full websites could be preferably to a cut-down mobile version, the majority of these devices are still smaller-screened smartphones.

In its UK consumer brand study the IAB found that consumers who visited a mobile optimised site a third more pages (19 Vs 12) that those looking at non optimised sites.

Alex Kozloff, senior mobile manager for IAB, said: “This study has shown that, across a number of measures, optimising websites increases consumer engagement. Though it is encouraging seeing that 40 per cent of the top UK advertisers are sitting up and listening to this, we still have work to do with the rest.”

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