More than 900 operators globally comprise the world’s mobile operator community. According to the latest research from Informa Telecoms & Media, $965 billion was generated in annualized service revenues by this community in 2010.
For the first time during 2011, overall service revenues are forecast to exceed $1 trillion on an annualized basis. This is due to the easing impact of the economic downturn on the industry. Another factor is the data which continues to offset regulatory-driven pressures on core voice and SMS revenues. By the end of 2015, the overall service revenues are expected to reach $1.14 trillion.
In a release, Thomas Wehmeier, principal analyst at Informa said, “The operators may earn big, but it should never be forgotten that they also invest heavily to generate these returns. Deploying and operating mobile networks to support more than 5.3 billion connections is an extremely resource-intensive business and Informa (News - Alert) Telecoms & Media estimates that operators worldwide invested more than $175 billion in capex during 2010 alone.”
Wehmeier added that over the past decade, the cumulative total capex spend shelled out by operators has been over $1 trillion.
According to Informa, dividends in helping to spur the growth of new revenue lines are being paid by the investments made by operators. The operators have deployed next-generation networks, subsidized the latest high-end smartphones and built extensive multichannel retail footprints for the same. In 2015, revenues from all mobile data services are expected to grow to $453 billion as compared to 2010’s $253 billion.
In a release, Wehmeier said, “If the media hype is to be believed around the impact of over-the-top VoIP players such as Skype (News - Alert) and Viber and the emergence of competing forms of social communication from Facebook and Twitter, you’d be easily pressed into believing that operators should start thinking about writing off their voice businesses.”
According to Wehmeier, such talk is foolhardy. Over 60 percent of the industry’s revenue base at the end of 2015 will be still made up by voice services’ revenues.
Wehmeier concluded that the single largest revenue upside opportunity for operators worldwide is represented by getting more smartphones into users’ hands and successfully persuading them to spend on data.
Calvin Azuri is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Calvin’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Jennifer Russell