Airwide unveils Mobile Messaging Barometer

The Global Mobile Messaging Barometer for 2008 highlights growth opportunities in emerging and mature markets worldwide.

Airwide Solutions, the leading provider of next-generation mobile messaging and mobile internet infrastructure, applications and solutions, has announced its Global Mobile Messaging Barometer for 2008, designed to identify what's hot and what's not in some of the most interesting and active regions around the world, focusing on Africa, Asia, Europe, The Middle East and The Americas.

Asia continues to demonstrate the strongest overall growth opportunity.

With hundreds of millions of potential customers, the region represents an unprecedented opportunity for mobile communications to grow.

However, ARPU remains low as does the per-minute cost of calls and services.

This leaves operators in a quandary over where to concentrate their efforts, either with wealthy portions of the population, which requires investment in costly add-on services, or with rural populations which won't boost ARPU in the near future but if reached would generate a large revenue opportunity.

Key findings of the report show that the Middle East illustrates the greatest potential for growth of emerging services such as mobile IM, email, videoconferencing and MMS.

Based on the Airwide findings, the UAE looks set to embrace emerging services at a rapid rate.

For instance, by 2013 mobile email will be almost as popular as SMS, while mobile TV and advertising, content download and mobile inventory are also likely to scoop a significant share of the available market.

The Airwide Barometer not only focuses on regions, but also measures the current and future popularity of mobile communications methods and issues within selected countries.

For example, mobile spam has been identified as a hot issue in China and will continue as such over the next five years.

Similarly the threat of mobile viruses also looks set to increase.

The findings from the research on Europe show that mobile email, mobile music and MMS are more ingrained services than many places in the world and there is growing confidence among operators that these services can provide a steady and sustained growth in revenues.

For example, in the United Kingdom, accelerated growth is expected in mobile versions of applications that are already firmly established while deskbound and therefore mobile email is expected to double its share of the total market over the next five years while mobile web browsing is expected to quadruple its share.

While it is somewhat difficult to group the diverse and varied wireless markets of North, Central and South under one heading of The Americas, overall, Airwide has identified many and varied growth opportunities across the region although the opportunities are highly country-specific.

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