Communications and Technology Industry Research

A report from Portio Research on mobile messaging suggests that SMS will continue to be the cash cow of mobile data revenues for some time to come.

 

Traffic volumes and revenues continue to confound predictions – not this one, though, of course – and are “expected to keep growing throughout the global economic downturn,” according to the Portions. The study estimates the whole mobile messaging industry, worth $130 billion in 2008, will be worth $224 billion by 2013, 60 percent of non-voice service revenues.

 

The report, “Mobile Messaging Futures 2008 – 2013,” asserts that “there is nothing likely to stop continued growth of mobile messaging in the short term, driven by a cocktail of ubiquitous SMS, media rich MMS, enterprise based mobile e-mail and youth-conscious mobile IM.”

 

SMS remains king because there is no cheap, easy-to-use alternative that will work with all phones and across all networks, not to mention the fact the study mentions: “It is loved the world over.” Indeed in the U.S. market, where SMS was a comparative slow starter, use per subscriber per month is now almost double the European average.

 

Still, we’re pikers compared to China, where average users send over 100 messages each month, and the Filipinos leave the rest of the world in the dust, churning out 755 messages per person each month.

 

A recent Gartner (News - Alert) study estimates that 189 billion mobile messages have been sent by U.S. mobile-phone subscribers in 2007. It forecasts 301 billion mobile messages sent in 2008, according to industry observer Tim Leberecht.

 

Portio also predict a bright future for mobile e-mail even though Japan is the only market where consumer mobile e-mail has surpassed the use of SMS. E-mail is still the most popular form of business communication – relax, you’re still normal – and the report suggests that mobile e-mail users worldwide will quadruple from approximately a quarter of a billion users in 2008 to over a billion users by the end of 2013.

 

The horse to bet on, though, seems to be mobile instant messaging, even though it’s still beset by the technical problems of interoperability. Portio foresees exponential growth in mobile IM users, surging from a worldwide total of 111 million users in 2008 to 867 million users by the close of 2013, which translates into growth from $2.5 billion in 2008 to approximately $12.4 billion in 2013.

 

As Leberecht says, Apple appears to be the prime mover there as well: “The company is apparently developing a chat application for the iPhone (News - Alert), as revealed recently through a patent application that describes a ‘portable electronic device with a touch-screen display, comprising (a) means for displaying a set of messages exchanged between a user of the device and another person in a chronological order.’ That's basically the description of an UI for an iPhone IM application.”