Acision makes global mobile predictions for 2009

Despite uncertain forecasts this year, Acision believes that the changing economic landscape will present many revenue opportunities for service providers.

Based on the 2008/2009 New Year SMS figures alone, messaging and its associated revenues will continue to soar globally despite the economic downturn.

Global SMS traffic increased by 30 per cent over the new year period compared to the same period last year as revellers sent more than 55 billion text messages, with 31 billion of these being processed successfully through Acision’s systems.

SMS growth was highest in North America, where six billion new year messages were sent. In Asia, the Philippines retains its leading position as a text messaging nation, with more than three billion messages sent over the new year by a subscriber base of just 66 million.

These figures demonstrate that SMS is still the preferred choice for communicating and is set to remain the most dominant data revenue driver for service providers in 2009, said Steven van Zanen, VP of product marketing at Acision.

“In mature and saturated markets in some parts of Asia-Pacific, Acision believes that ‘sweating’ underutilised network assets will be instrumental in driving more messaging revenue. By offering value-added enhancements to messaging that are already proving to be effective in the online community, such as automated replies and out-of-office, service providers can offer more convenience and productivity to end users, while increasing revenue streams.”

“Additionally, in all markets, messaging will increasingly be a key way to interact with personal blogs and online services such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. This approach was very successful in the US where the operators have marketed multimedia messaging as a channel in their social networking offerings. As a result, MMS traffic per user in the US is twice the global average. In emerging markets, such as Africa and parts of Asia, where fixed-line infrastructure is limited, basic mobile messaging services will also remain a cost effective form of communicating for users.”

Mobile broadband also saw growth in mature markets fuelled by the growing availability of high speed access networks, flat fee pricing models, increased smart phone usage and ‘plug and play’ laptop dongles.

Acision predicts that by 2012 a nine-fold increase in global mobile broadband revenues is expected but only if operators put the right solutions in place to control traffic volumes over the network.

Mobile marketing, however, will remain in its early stages this year, with mobile operators continuing to experiment with single-channel solutions. To increase revenue, service providers will need to leverage more from the mobile marketing value chain they already have in place.
Van Zanen said: “Budgets are shrinking however the mobile’s direct route to the consumer is increasing its appeal as a marketing mechanism. To fully kick off mobile marketing, service providers need to monetise mobile messaging as a vehicle for advertising, work with the brands to enable advert insertion as part of the existing communications streams, provide end user control so subscribers can opt in or receive some level of reward and increase advertising relevance based on a customer’s identity and full context such as location, usage and device capabilities.”

In Asia-Pacific, Acision predicts location-based directory search would take off during 2009.

Prepaid charging models will also continue to dominate globally as more users opt for prepaid phones due to the global recession hits and credit being limited. Prepaid demand looks set to increase in regions such as India and China as well as the US, where a credit check is no longer required to buy a prepaid SIM card.

Simon Dallyn, SVP of charging at Acision, said: “Operators can also provide discounted offers for customers in locations with low usage, thereby increasing traffic on underused networks. These are highly popular charging and billing models which are used in parts of Asia and should be replicated across the world as they provide unique ways for operators to add value to customers while driving up revenues.”