Mobile Unified Communications Featured Article

There is a well-founded reason why Nokia (News - Alert) is spending so much time and energy developing ultra-low-cost phones: global mobile subscriber growth now is driven by users in the "ermerging" and "developing" world. Looking at mobile service providers with the highest quarterly growth in wireless subscribers, three of the top ten are in China and five are in India.

 

 

In the second quarter of 2009, the top 15 largest mobile service providers grew by just a fraction of a percent from the previous quarter, says TeleGeography (News - Alert). The global recession is the obvious culprit. Where global growth rates were in the six percent range in 2006, in the four to five percent range in 2008 and are in the three percent to four percent range in 2009.

 

Still, something else also is at work. Growth rates in any new market always are stunningly high in the early stages of growth, when the installed base of users is quite small. Over time, as the number of buyers grows, growth rates naturally fall. As more end users get mobile service, and the user base grows, growth rates inevitably will fall.

 

There now are 4.3 billion wireless users (or voice handset users plus subscriber information modules or dongles or data cards). In the second quarter 130 million new subscribers were added. That doesn't mean markets in the BRIC countries are saturated, by any means. But growth rates will slow as the installed base grows.

 

That would be true with, or without, a global recession.