Worldwide messaging revenues continue rise

2 Feb 2010

According to the 4th edition of Portio Research's report ‘Mobile Messaging Futures', despite the recent worldwide economic downturn during the last two years mobile messaging revenues continue to rise and the sector as a whole looks to be in excellent health.

The appetite for mobile messaging continues unabated and is likely to be sustained for the foreseeable future. The new edition of the report, ‘Mobile Messaging Futures 2010-2014', discusses the vast mobile messaging industry worldwide, currently generating revenues in excess of US$150 billion, and set to continue growing to more than US$233 billion by 2014.

The performance of SMS over the last five years has been staggering and remains so mainly because it is cheap, easy to use, convenient, discreet and universally acceptable to some four billion consumers worldwide. During
2009 SMS continued to grow in all markets and the report confidently predicts that it will continue to do so for several more years. In 2009 worldwide SMS traffic topped five trillion messages, and that figure is set to exceed 10 trillion in 2013.

Today MMS, often cited as a failure, is a massive revenue-generating segment of the market. Full year revenues for 2009 amount to almost US$27 billion - not far off what SMS was generating five years ago. MMS is growing fast in all major regions around the world as affordable camera-equipped handsets flood the market and increasingly become the norm.

Mobile email has come of age and the report predicts aggressive growth with revenues predicted to triple over the next five years. Enterprise email accounts for between 70-85 percent of current revenues as more and more devices meet strict corporate security requirements.

Rapid adoption of smartphones with high-end features and bundled data plans characterises the consumer segment.

Despite the popularity of SMS mobile Instant Messaging (mobile IM), especially popular with the youth segment that has grown up with the Internet equivalent, is growing fast. Portio predict huge growth for mobile IM with nearly a billion regular users by 2014. This massive growth in users will be accompanied by an equally impressive increase in revenues worth US$18 billion by 2014.

‘Mobile Messaging Futures 2010-2014' provides detailed and in depth discussion of all mobile messaging technologies, as well as business models, regional breakdowns, network technology impacts, value chain shifts and advice for operators backed by a wealth of charts and statistics.

For further information or to purchase a copy of this report, send an email to , call: +44 (0) 12 49 656964 or go to www.portioresearch.com.