Report: Regional differences impact content growth

A new report issued by market intelligence firm iSuppli forecasts the market for premium mobile content will exceed $44 billion by 2011, more than doubling the $20 million anticipated for 2007. According to iSuppli, mobile video is the fastest-growing mobile media segment, with music and gaming also strong. However, significant regional differences are emerging:

• In the Asian market, India leads compound annual growth rate growth of non-messaging data revenue at 40.4 percent.
• In the Western European market, Italy will experience the strongest non-messaging data revenue CAGR through 2011 at 29 percent. While ringtones currently represent the strongest segment, video will dominate Italian mobile content revenue by 2011, followed by games.
• In the Americas, Brazil will enjoy a 41 percent CAGR for non-messaging data revenues. In the United States, messaging revenues doubled in 2006 compared to the previous year, driven by increased peer-to-peer messaging and increased premium SMS revenue.
• In Asia and Europe, ringtone growth is slowing as the markets mature. By 2011, China, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States will lead in ringtone sales, but many country-level markets will peak before 2011.
• In Asia, mobile gaming growth is also slowing. Korea and Japan dominated gaming revenues in 2006.

According to iSuppli, data now accounts for 20 percent of revenue among 20 key international operators. SK Telecom, NTT DoCoMo and O2 all derive more than 30 percent of their revenues from data. "Data and content revenues are the life preservers for wireless operators, as voice ARPU declines accelerated during Q2 among the 20 key operators tracked by iSuppli," said Mark Kirstein, iSuppli vice president of multimedia content and services. "Drawn from our deep operator profiles, aggregate voice ARPU in the first quarter declined by 6 percent sequentially compared to the fourth quarter of 2006. Meanwhile, mobile data ARPU increased by 1 percent sequentially. Data ARPU is particularly strong among North American operators, where both messaging revenue and mobile multimedia content are seeing strong growth."

For more on the iSuppli report:
- read this release       

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