[Satellite News 07-20-10] The global mobile value-added-service (VAS) industry, which produced revenues of $200 billion in 2009, will see revenues jump to $340 billion by 2014, according to a report released July 20 by analyst firm Informa Telecoms.
    In the report, Senior Analyst Shailendra Pandey said that emerging markets will be the key driver in the growth, with China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Russia, Poland and the Ukraine expected to account for 36 percent of global mobile data revenues in 2014.
   “Compared to the developed world, there are very different economic, social, demographic and cultural challenges in the emerging markets. In many countries, 3G services are still not available, or are limited to mobile subscribers in larger cities. Therefore operators have to depend on 2G services such as SMS, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data and Interactive Voice Response systems, to be able to drive mass market adoption of their mobile value-added-services, and to successfully reach subscribers in smaller towns and rural areas,” said Pandey.
    Informa indentified mobile operators and service providers in emerging markets as “more innovative and proactive in developing and deploying new mobile VAS,” than their competitors in developed nations. For these operators, the rewards for creativity include a strong uptake of utility services, such as mobile payments, P2P funds transfer and agricultural information services.   Pandey said these services are making an impact on the day-to-day lives of local populations and are contributing to social and economic development in emerging markets.
    “Mobile social networking is beginning to see strong growth in emerging markets but most of the services are instant messaging chat applications. One of the most successful service examples is China Mobile‘s IM service called Fetion, which has over 100 million registered users. The addressable market for the Fetion service is large as it can work using IVR, GPRS and SMS access modes. [Other examples include] services such as M-PESA from Safaricom in Kenya, the Rural Information Service from China Mobile, the ‘Please Call Me’ service from MTN in South Africa and the ‘CellBazaar’ service from GrameenPhone in Bangladesh,” said Pandey.
    While application uptake has been stronger in the emerging markets, Informa notes that Mobile application stores have not received the same attention from the operators those regions as they have in the United States and Western Europe. But, this may not be the situation for much longer. Operators, such as China Mobile, have already considering launching their own app stores. Earlier this year, China Mobile collaborated with Nokia to launch a joint mobile app store, MM-Ovi, and has reported that over 4 million mobile apps were downloaded from the store by March 2010.
    Pandey said investors should take notice of the shifting market dynamics and give more credit to consumers in emerging markets. “With high market saturation and limited growth prospects in developed countries, the emerging markets with a high growth potential are becoming a key focus for mobile industry players including operators, handset manufacturers and infrastructure vendors, as well as the VAS platform and technology vendors.”