Always On Real-Time Access

New Whitepaper: The Untapped Mobile Data Opportunity December 16, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, Carriers, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, General, IP, IP Strategy, India, Indian Wireless Market, Infrastructure, Intellectual Property, International Trade, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, M&A, MVNO, Microsoft Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Mobile Users, Networks, Smart Phones, Speech Recognition, Storage, US Wireless Market, Unified Messaging, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 3 comments

http://www.chetansharma.com/untappedmobiledataopportunity.htm

The Untapped Mobile Data Opportunity

Roundup of second Mobile Breakfast Series event – Mobile Broadband December 6, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, AORTA, ARPU, CTIA, Carriers, Indian Wireless Market, Infrastructure, Location Based Services, Mergers and Acquisitions, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Users, Mobile Wallet, Networks, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 3 comments

The second Mobile Breakfast Series Event was held at the picturesque Harbor Club in downtown Seattle on Dec 4th. The topic was “The Impact and Evolution of Mobile Broadband.” The lineup of speakers was awesome with who’s who of the mobile broadband world opining about the state of the industry, the opportunities, and challenges posed by the growth in mobile broadband:

Neville Ray, Senior Vice President of Engineering, T-Mobile USA

Hank Skorny, Senior Vice President, Media Cloud Computing and Services, Real Networks

Ken Denman, CEO, Openwave

Dow Draper, Vice President, Technology Partnerships, Clearwire

Charlie Martin, Wireless CTO, Huawei Technologies

Stacey Higginbotham, Senior Writer, GigaOM (moderator)

First of all, a big thanks to our generous sponsors: Motricity, Openwave, and Clearwire of supporting the event series. I am happy to report that Motricity has signed up to be the sponsor for the entire 2010 season. So, thanks Jennifer Moranz and Brendan Benzing. Thanks also to Ken Denman and Lupe Downing at Openwave, and Jeff Giard and Scott Richardson at Clearwire for their support. Thanks also to our esteemed panelists who have taken the time out of their busy schedules to be here with us this morning, esp. Ken, Charlie, and Stacey who had to hop on a plane to be at the event. Also, thanks to GigaOM and Moconews for being such terrific media sponsors.

As our operators continue to enhance the infrastructure both in the US as well as abroad, it is creating new opportunities and challenges for the industry. As you know, our friends at the FCC are also very consumed by the task of creating a National Broadband Policy and mobile is a key component of that proposal.

It was one of the best discussions on mobile broadband I have heard all year long. Panelists were really frank and insightful.

The salient points of the 90 minute discussions were:

The disparity between the available bandwidth and the bandwidth demand is becoming apparent and the industry is scrambling to find solutions to stay ahead of the curve.
Even at these high usage rates, mobile data is quite profitable for the operators. Vendors typically don’t a full grasp of the carrier economics and end up making some product choices that are not that directly relevant or useful for the carriers.
Consumers are willing to pay more for better access, higher speeds, and good content and significant opportunities await us in the coming years.
There is no such thing as “free lunch” and someone has to pay for the bandwidth. Sometimes it feels that the pie is not big enough to feed all the hands that are the in the revenue share pot.
Spectrum and capacity is king and whoever has a good spectrum tends to benefit competitively.
Out of necessity, companies come up with innovative solutions e.g. T-Mobile focusing on WiFi in the early days when AT&T didn’t want to touch it and Verizon mocked it. Now WiFi is central to their mobile data strategy.
Traffic from non-phones will exceed that from the typical feature and smartphones.
Business and revenue models that will help sustain the industry are going to come from outside the industry.
With so much at stake, carriers will figure out ways to participate the appstore value chain.
Browsers have shattered the control of the ecosystem and we are just at the tip of the iceberg.
We will soon see the return of the tier-ing price plans. QoS will enter the picture soon. Likely to have platinum vs. gold service concept emerge
Solutions – mobile analytics, video optimization, traffic shaping – it comes down the “art of delivering a packet”
Apps are not a zero-sum game.
There will be a metamorphosis of physics and economics of mobile data, new group of players will emerge.
Carriers have historically not done a good job of picking winning applications but they will figure ways to participate in the new ecosystem.
Compared to the online Internet market, mobile Internet market is quite nascent and we are expected to see significant opportunities emerge in the next couple of years.
While iPhone has been a great device, it is the Google applications that make it so popular.
Presence, social networking, and connectedness will all help in creating a brave new world of mobile data services.
More Carrier branded solutions to come.
If carriers are cut of the revenue stream, they might have less incentive to upgrade their networks.
Technographics, Psychographics, and Demographics data very useful for application developers and we can expect operators to open up consumer information gradually for the ecosystem.
Some see Android getting more closed with each release, OEMs need to open up the device for app developers to take full advantage of capabilities.
T-Mobile has been rapidly expanding their 3G footprint with expected coverage increase to 200M by end of the year.
The levers operators can use to control data usage – pricing, QoS
FCC’s action is having a positive impact on the industry though we need a lot of work (and a lot of spectrum)

Also, Tricia Duryee does a good summary of the discussion at Moconews

Our next event is looking to be another sellout affair with tech titan Rob Glaser, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Real Networks headlining the event. Be sure to register early to avoid any sellout blues. Date: March 10, 2010.

Until then, a very happy new year to you and yours and have a terrific holiday season that helps you prepare for a successful 2010.

US Mobile Data Market Update Q3 2009 November 9, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, CTIA, Carnival of Mobilists, Carriers, Devices, European Wireless Market, IP Strategy, Indian Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, M&A, MVNO, Mergers and Acquisitions, Messaging, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Networks, Partnership, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, Unified Messaging, Usability, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 5 comments

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Executive Summary

The US wireless data market grew 5% Q/Q and 27% Y/Y to exceed $11.3B in mobile data service revenues and thus exceeded $10B for the third straight quarter. As we mentioned in our Q1 2009 research note, given the strong growth in data revenues and overall service revenues, the worst is over for the US mobile industry. The US market touched 25% penetration of smartphones in Q3 2009, a new milestone.

While the flailing economy hit certain segments of the wireless ecosystem hard esp. the infrastructure and handset segments, consumers haven’t really pulled back on the mobile data overall spending. Additionally, the CAPEX spending has stayed strong in 2009 given the activity around 3G/4G deployments and trials. As expected, there was an increase of prepaid subscribers which dropped the overall revenues for some of the carriers. The US subscription penetration was approximately 91.3% at the end of Q3 2009.

As we mentioned in our last three research notes that this time around, the fate of the US mobile industry is more closely tied to the overall economy compared to the previous recessions. As the consumer sentiment improved over the last two quarters along with better than expected Q1-3 2009 earnings from corporations, the mobile industry is back on track. While the structural flaws in various industry segments remain, the outlook for the Q4 2009 and 2010 remains bright and we are expecting the overall data revenues to now increase by over 30% compared to 2008 with a record-setting Q4.

Q3 2009 reported a 3.5% increase in GDP compared to the 1% decline in Q2 and 6.4% decline in Q1, thus marking the official (technical) end of the recession. The GDP is expected to change by 3.2% for 2009 and the service revenues are expected to account for 1.13% of the US economy by year-end. Note: For a detailed discussion of the US wireless industry in recessions, please see 2008 US Wireless Market Update.

So, what does this mean? Well, the markets can still be volatile, but overall the market seems to be feeling better about the economy than it was in February. The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index though retreated from June is at a healthy 47.7.

What to expect in the coming months?

The high unemployment has slowed the growth in the data card segment but the smartphone consumers have more than picked up the slack. Also, as expected, there was a shift from postpaid to prepaid in some user segments. For example, for T-Mobile, prepaid accounts for almost 20% of their customer base compared to 17% from an year ago. The fight for the low-end customer is also having an impact on the traditional prepaid players and the price pressure is reducing their margins. It is quite likely that 50-60% of such consumers don’t go back to postpaid thus permanently lowering the ARPU base for such customers and carriers who have experienced more postpaid to prepaid shift will have to make up for the lost revenues elsewhere.

In fact, the churning in the last few quarters has distanced the top two (AT&T and Verizon) and the next two (Sprint and T-Mobile) by the biggest gap in the history of the industry. By the end of 2009, this gap will rise to 36% compared to 28% at the end of 2008 and 21% in 2002.The "Rest" category has essentially diminished from the market dropping from a dominant 43% market share in 2002 to 12% in 2009.

The trend of the landline replacement by Mobile continued in Q3 2009, now reaching almost 25%. In the third quarter, messaging growth slowed down. The messaging volume was up only 4% and messaging revenues were up 3% QoQ. With its expanding 3G network, T-Mobile like its peers has started to benefit from smartphone penetration reaching to 6% of its subscriber base. Overall, The increased use of smartphones and datacards is putting a pressure on carrier networks and accelerating their strategies to deploy LTE/WiMAX. We estimate that by end of 2009, the US mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 400 petabytes, up 193% from 2008. To truly tackle the problem head-on, operators will need to adopt a multi-pronged strategy to manage their traffic more effectively. We discuss mobile data traffic in much more detail in our paper "Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era." We will have more on this subject in the coming days (You can also read our RCR Wireless columns on the subject - Defining Mobile Broadband and Solutions for the Broadband World).

We will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q3 2009 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues (Slides 11-12, 17, 19)

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 5% Q/Q to $11.3B in Q209. Compared to Q308, the data service revenues grew 27%.
Verizon and AT&T accounted for 80% of the increase in data revenues in Q3 2009.
The US mobile data service revenues crossed $10B for the third straight quarter and stays ahead of Japan and China by a distance.
AT&T experienced the most growth with over 6% increase Q/Q followed by Verizon and Sprint at 5%.
Verizon’s data revenues exceeded $4B/quarter only inches behind the global leader of over 10 years NTT DoCoMo.
AT&T and Verizon now account for 68% of the market data services revenues and 61.5% of the subscriber base.
The average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU is now 28%. US market is likely to touch the 30% mark in 2009 though it might not quite eclipse it.
The top four US carriers are now a permanent fixture in the top 10 global operators by mobile data service revenues occupying #3, #4, #6, and #8 spot respectively. Apart from NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile, Verizon Wireless and AT&T are the only two other operators generating more than $3B in quarterly mobile data service revenues.

ARPU (Slides 13-15)

Overall ARPU decreased by $0.14. Average voice ARPU declined by $0.57 while the average data ARPU grew by $0.43 or 3%.
Verizon led in (blended) data ARPU with $15.59 followed by AT&T and Sprint. In terms of % contribution, Verizon exceeded 30% to become the first US operator to do so. It was followed closely by AT&T and Sprint respectively. T-Mobile also exceeded $10 in data ARPU for the first time.
AT&T experienced something unique - an increase in voice ARPU (for the first time in 10 quarters). The voice ARPU increased $.03 in Q3 2009.

Subscribers (Slides 16-18)

In Q309, the US market added approximately 2.7M new subscriptions down 1% from Q109.
The number of data subscribers has been on the rise with Verizon leading the way. At the end of Q309, 67% of US subscribers were using some form of data services.
The messaging volumes in the US market now average almost 568 messages/subscriber/month or at the frequency of almost a message/hour/sub thus reaching close to the messaging leader Philippines.
In terms of net-adds, thanks to the boost from the iPhone, ATT again led in Q309 with 2M net-adds, edging its friendly rival Verizon which added 1.2M net subscriptions. Sprint lost 565K.
T-Mobile lost customers for the first time in its history. It lost 77K customers in the quarter.
The 3G penetration in the US stays at a healthy 43% in Q309. Verizon led the pack while T-Mobile is slowly expanding its 3G coverage. The growth in 3G and smartphones is helping offset some of the downward pressure on the data revenues and overall ARPU.
The gap between the top two (AT&T and Verizon) and the next two (Sprint and T-Mobile) is at its maximum. By the end of 2009, this gap will rise to 36% compared to 28% at the end of 2008 and 21% in 2002.The "Rest" category has essentially diminished from the market dropping from a dominant 43% market share in 2002 to 12% in 2009.

Applications and Services

Non-messaging services continue to grab 50-65% of the data revenues for the US carriers.
The flat-rate pricing movement that was started by Willcom in Japan which moved to Europe became more prevalent in the US market with industry wide flat-rate pricing plans that included data. All the major carriers seem to be offering flat-fee access plans for most of the new smartphones being introduced in the market. Approximately 20% of the consumers have flat-rate data plans.
There are probably 18-20 sub-segments within mobile data services and consolidation looms. While the valuations are still high for rapid consolidation, we think that due to recession pressure, the M&A scene is starting to heat up.
The usage and data consumption trends are enabling carriers to accelerate their 4G plans and develop long-term business and technical strategies.

Handsets

Nokia sold 100M+ units in Q3 2009. Samsung again had a solid quarter with over 60M devices sold inching its market share to almost 21%. LG Electronics at 11%, Sony Ericsson at 4.9%, and Motorola at 4.7% rounded up the top 5.
The third quarter was again dominated by blockbuster launches of smartphones. Androids have been invading the industry en-masse and 2010 looks to be a terrific year for consumers and competition.
The growth in smartphone usage is also putting pressure on the networks which are not able to handle the load during peak times in certain cities thus forcing carriers to look for alternate strategies to satisfy the demand for broadband - usage billing, UMA, Femtocells, Hotspots, WiMAX, LTE, and others.

Policy and Regulations

· Q3 also marked the start of an intense FCC scrutiny of the wireless industry. In outlining the four key principles of a) looming crisis of spectrum shortage b) removal of red tape c) enforce net-neutrality and d) open Internet, things have already started to change in the US Wireless Industry. Google has played the game of Armadaian tactics with Kasparovian acumen. The impact of the codified principles (and the subsequent court battles) can have a significant impact on not only the US wireless industry but the global ecosystem as well.

Open

The appstores battle is intensifying with OEMs and carriers are announcing their plans and some of them are opening their wares to woo the developer community. In the midst of the appstores hoopla, Apple announced the passing of the 2 Billion download mark with increasing number of developers participating the ecosystem. The new functionality being released with 3.0 is taking the battle up a notch. The clear-cut business model of 30/70+ split is attractive to the long-tail of developers. While there is no dearth of applications, findability remains a challenge. Also, appstores are changing the monetization strategies for content and application developers.
The App vs. Mobile Web debate is getting intense. The evolution is pretty clear - for the applications that don’t require significant UI resources, it will be better to develop in for the browser, for intensive games, the native platform will be ahead of the browser advances. The location API access on the iPhone browser is breakthrough to have developers start thinking about the webapps. But, what does it do to the control points and the revenue models?

· While there has been much consternation around the word "Open," one is hard pressed to find a consistent definition what it might actually mean. One could provide access to one API and declare themselves an open heretic while others could end up opening up their business more than needed and yet be accused of being closed. Clearly, the degree to openness is in the eye of the recipient. There is no black and white, just shades of grey and that’s where the battles will be won and lost. In the end, it is all about "access" to the market and the "freedom" to earn profits. Rest is noise.

· It is worth debating as to what can be mandated to be open, do the rules apply just to the operators and OEMs, or we should extend the courtesy to software platforms, search indices, aggregated user profiles, billing engines, etc.

· It is also becoming obvious that we need to redefine the device categories. Featurephones are no longer dumb terminals, many empower the users with smartphone functionality. Devices like iPhone, Droid, Pre no longer fit the smartphone stereotype, they need a separate category for themselves - appphones, ddhmvcs (data devices that happen to make voice calls), platformdevices, mobilecomputers, geniusdevices, agilechips, astuteconceirge, you get the point.

Misc.

Not surprisingly, Venture capital market experienced a continued decline in 2009, with companies announcing $1.5B in financings vs. $3B for the same time period. (Source: Rutberg)
In a sign of convergence battles to come, T-Mobile’s @Home and various Femto cell initiatives are taking hold. Cable operators are also aggressively seeking triple-play by providing the wireless component of the service.
China crossed the 700M subscription mark in Q3. India crossed the 500M mark for telephone penetration (wireline + wireless) of which 472 are mobile subscriptions. In terms of net-adds, India has outpaced China for the last 16 months. The Indian market added almost 155M vs. 101M in China during the last four quarters. (more discussion on the international market in our global market update next year)

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds, future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Feb 2009. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Mar 2010.

Watch out for our end of the year survey and commentary on global wireless markets and trends for 2010.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Should you have any questions about navigating or understanding the economic and competitive icebergs, please feel free to drop us a line.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Roundup 2009 October 12, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, CTIA, Carriers, Devices, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, Federal, Indian Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, M&A, MVNO, Microsoft Mobile, Middleware, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Mobile Users, Networks, Smart Phones, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, Unified Messaging, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 3 comments

CTIA San Diego Roundup

San Diego is a casual town so this year’s CTIA fit nicely with an equally casual show, that felt more like a networking party sprinkled with some striking keynotes and engaging sessions. However, the biggest tremors were felt a day before the event started with Verizon getting in bed with Google and AT&T embracing VoIP with open arms. FCC’s curiosity into the wireless world has yielded more action in 3 months than many years combined before. I was drawn more to the policy debate and the implications to the wireless industry in the US and to the rest of the world. There was intense discussion on appstores and their place in the future, mobile advertising and its maturity, enhancing retail experience, accelerated growth in mobile health in recent times, and of course the tremendous growth in the US wireless data market but if you already knew that. This note summarizes the observations and opinions from the event, discussions, and briefings.

A friend of mine at the FCC invited me to the FCC Broadband Field Hearing occurring simultaneously with the CTIA at the University of San Diego. I am glad I went. The first panel was on the App Ecosystem with a diverse panel of industry verticals – rural, public safety, health care, environment, air quality, health care complimented by the discussion of the iPhone and its impact on the mobile industry. Chairman Julius Genachowski is to iPhone what President Obama was to Blackberry. He described his love for the apps with tender affection.

I am finding that the whole process of broadband planning to be quite interesting. The proceedings have been open and participatory, interest and feedback has been intense, and the principles have been clearly stated. This helped with a broader question that my CTO team for the FiREGlobal panel (to be held on Oct 15^th) is addressing. We are tasked with a unique challenge of coming up with technology solutions for better civic discourse and our team consists of experts in the public and private enterprise to give a set of recommendations. We are currently under intense discussions and will unveil our suggestions on thursday. Stay Tuned.

Coming back to the FCC talk, Julius described four key principles:

Most importantly he described the spectrum shortage as a looming crisis and that additional spectrum capacity is needed to handle the demand of data traffic from data cards and smartphones (something we have illustrated in detail in our paper - "Managing growth and profits in the Yottabyte era")
Removing red tape to allow wireless carriers to build their network faster, for example, the work with cell towers
Codify and enforce net-neutrality policies
Operate more openly

While 1) and 2) have been discussed in the industry for some time, it is the mention of 3) and 4) that has changed industry in more ways than one. AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega took the stage after the Chairman and gave a spirited defense of the industry that requires no regulation. Frankly, the mere mention of the word "open" has had quite an impact on the industry in last 3 months. (I will be moderating two panels at the upcoming Open Mobile Summit on "What open means to apps providers" and "Apps in the cloud" in Nov, 2009)

Of course, as always, it is from the details that the devil flexes it muscles. How FCC will end up defining "open," "net neutrality," "network management" and other key items will determine the course of the industry. I wrote a piece that appeared in RCR Wireless “Defining Mobile Broadband” that outlined some of the same principles but from an operator strategy point of view suggested a much broader strategic imperative of building intelligent platform to survive long-term. The recommendations we made in our Yottabyte paper are being adopted and discussed much more openly since it was released in July. Due to significant interest, we will some follow-up research on the topic in the coming days, so stay tuned. I will be giving a ISACA luncheon keynote on the topic on Oct 20^th. Of course, our Mobile Breakfast Series panel on mobile broadband will delve into the details of the broadband ecosystem on Dec 4th. Be sure to register.

Each year our small community in Issaquah, WA celebrates a festival “Salmon Days.” As I was strolling around the hatchery, it helped me prepare for my talk on the Appstore ecosystem. The fish traveling upstream has several parallels to the developers trying to make in the 80,000 db appond. So, I focused my talk on how the ecosystem needs to come together urgently to build the fish ladder to give more developers a chance to make it to the next level to create a vibrant and sustainable ecosystem. While Microsoft’s mobile strategy is disarray right now, they are one of the few companies who understand the caring and feeding of the developer ecosystem (another one is Ebay). If the ecosystem focuses primarily on their profits and margins, the rich ecosystem might be at a risk of collapsing.

I discussed several factors that can help foster a healthier ecosystem starting with fish ladder. If you are interested in the presentation, please drop me a line. There was pretty good discussion from some experienced and successful developers. The emergence of appstore mania has been a double-edged sword. Developers are back in demand but their attention is finite and they are forced to allocate resources accordingly. I was also surprised to find out about the level of piracy and counterfeit goods in the appstore and how little is being done to protect legitimate developers. Some of the ladder factors I discussed were: greater revenue share, connection with investors, iTunes and carrier billing, location and presence, user profile and context, reports and analytics, $0 signup and certification, better search and discovery, social interaction and virality, flexible payment and billing models, better networks and devices, reduced fragmentation, more open APIs and marketing dollars. If you are interested, drop me a line and I will send you the ppt.

I also had a chance to moderate a panel on Mobile Advertising and the current state of affairs. While mobile advertising is the only advertising sector that has shown growth this year, it is not breaking out to stand on its own. Large media companies are primarily looking mobile as a complimentary channel though they are clearly enamored by its potential. Lack of clear, uniform, auditable metrics is another issue though various industry bodies have been working together and some guidelines are expected to be released next quarter.

Overall, the show felt like a sponsored networking party with hardly any new announcements, the show floor was easier on the feet, the attendance was down again. However, the hallway conversations and running into friends and colleagues from the distant past is always priceless. The only newsworthy highlight for me was the emergence of mobile healthcare and mobile retail as separate categories at CTIA. There is clearly much potential and interest in these areas. We will have more on these topics in the coming months.

Some of the news worth items were:

John Donovan, CTO of AT&T opined on the growth in data consumption and how the company is tackling the upsurge in usage
Qualcomm released FLO TV service and devices but at $250 and $9/month, it, like Kindle seems to be stuck in the fidelity belly.
A number of local search services/apps are popping up: Geodelic, Aloqa, Decarta, etc. I built my first location app in 1996. 13 years hence, market seems to be coming around to the concept of LBS.
Number of mobile health companies were displaying their wares: Airstrip, Corventis, TotGuard, Sensiotec, and others. Lot of investment will flow into this sector in the coming days.
Companies like Openwave and Bytemobile talked about solutions for mobile data management.
Mobile Retail is picking up with NFC and now Nokia’s initiative of Global Retail Executive Council
More Androids are slated for release in 2010

It was great catching-up with friends and colleagues. Looking forward to the next one.

Roundup of the first Mobile Breakfast Series event September 29, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, Carriers, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, M&A, MVNO, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Users, Privacy, Speech Recognition, US Wireless Market, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , add a comment

The views from the venue are stunning both at the crack of dawn and as the sun lit the valley

The first Mobile Breakfast Series Event was held at the beautiful Newcastle Golf Club on Sept 22nd with our elite panelists - Marianne Marck - SVP, BlueNile, Michael Mace, Principal, Rubicon Consulting, Mike Woodward, VP, AT&T, and Jim Hudak, VP & GM, INQMobile. Before I get into what was discussed, would like to thanks the founding sponsors - Openwave, Motricity, and Clearwire who stepped in right away to make the Mobile Breakfast Series possible. Also, Jeff Giard and Brendan Benzing helped shape the event along the way. Finally, thanks to the extended pacific northwest mobile community for such a tremendous response. Hope you guys keep coming back for more.

The diversity and the experience on the panel was apparent. Mike Woodward has a long history with ATT and has been managing the broad device portfolio for the company. Michael Mace with Rubicon worked with Palm and Apple and is a veteran of the mobile industry cycles, Marianne Marck with BlueNile has seen the growth of mobile digital content like few have and brought in the perspective from the developer and content provider point of view. Finally, Jim Hudak has worked in a wide variety of roles and is now with INQMobile which won the best handset award in Barcelona. This gave us a good forum to explore the various aspects of our evolving industry (Moconews coverage here).

The salient points of the 90 minute discussions were:

· The panel thought the big opportunities are in:

o Specialized devices, though there is little VC investment in the area, there is an opportunity to build something unique by verticals or segments

o Network Optimization and Management, given the tremendous growth in mobile data usage, more technologies are needed to effectively manage the growth

o Besides voice and data, location based services represent the biggest opportunity in mobile

o Empower Impulse buys, embed technology to make it simple for users to buy

o Taking advantage of the mobile browser economy. Companies like Skyfire are expanding the capabilities of the browser that enables better application reach and penetration

· ATT has experienced 5000% growth in mobile data usage in the last 12 quarters. And it is good for business but the future growth needs to be more effectively managed.

· Mobile data is clearly taking off but are there limits to this growth? Will everyone pay $50/month extra? It is probably not for everyone.

· LTE brings down cost of delivering the bits. If EDGE costs $1 to deliver one MB, then HSPA costs 13c and LTE is around 3c. There is significant motivation to move towards LTE.

· While the total number of apps downloaded have exceeded 2B, it is not clear if there are new companies emerging out of the app economy. Developers are still struggling to make ends meet and if we don’t cultivate the ecosystem, very few will be left at the end of the day

· For developers, browser provides the broadest reach but for some apps the richness of the feature/functionality is only available in client apps. Over the long run, browser platform is preferable and is likely to win out.

· Carrier billing is essential for the app economy to survive. Not everyone has iTunes interface for their appstores.

· Femtocells/WiFi play an important role in offloading traffic and providing consumers with better bandwidth and coverage options.

· 75% of ATT’s devices are converged devices. Significant uptick in the last few quarters. Data consumption has been growing as a result. ATT is investing $18B or so in upgrading the network as well.

· Mobile OS becomes less relevant over time.

· Cloud Computing is important for mobile to help with network management, storage, and user experience.

· Microsoft was a freakish event in history, something similar is not going to happen in the mobile space and the fragmentation is not going to go away any time soon.

· Developers like to get access to UI APIs that give them more control over the user experience. Access to location

· Mobile advertising promising but not there yet. Metrics and standards issues need to be worked out.

· TV is a passive experience, Online is less passive, and Mobile is interactive experience. We should be designing apps and services keeping that in mind.

· Handset has become a software business. Companies not having a concrete s/w strategy will be exposed

· We live in interesting times

If you liked the first event, you would love the next one.

The topic is Mobile Broadband and we are getting some of the top notch experts to discuss the very important evolution of the global mobile broadband markets. Date: Dec 4th.

Our good friend Om Malik has kindly consented to moderate the event. Current confirmed panelists are Scott Richardson, former Chief Strategy Officer and now Strategic Advisor at Clearwire and Ken Denman, CEO of Openwave. More panelists to be confirmed in the coming days. Registration is open at http://mobilebreakfastseries.com/

Finally, we would love to hear your feedback. Please help us shape the event and make it your own. How can we make it better? What topics would you like to see discussed? Which speakers would like to hear from? What venues work best for you, etc? Answers will help shape the future events so every bit of feedback is much appreciated. If you could please take a short survey and let us know what you thought of the event as well any guidance on future events, that will be great.

Thanks and see you on Dec 4th.

US Wireless Data Market Update - Q2 2009 August 8, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, CTIA, Carriers, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, Indian Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile Usability, Patent Strategies, Patent Strategy, Smart Phones, Speaking Engagements, Strategy, US Wireless Market, Unified Messaging, Usability, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 4 comments

US Wireless Data Market Update - Q2 2009

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Executive Summary

The US wireless data market grew 7% Q/Q and 30% Y/Y to exceed $10.6B in mobile data service revenues and thus exceeded $10B for the second straight quarter. As we mentioned in our Q1 2009 research note, given the strong growth in data revenues shown by the top carriers and the increase in service revenues overall, the worst is over for the US mobile industry. In summary, the recession has been all but a tiny blip in its growth trend and the US mobile market has weathered the downward spiral in economy better than its counterparts in other developed nations. Of course, recession doesn’t treat all players equally, so, some have had a negative impact and will need more resources and effective strategies to claw back to the their previous market position.

The US subscription penetration was approximately 90.4% at the end of Q209. The current rate of net-adds (subscription) is approximately 3 every second (compared to a net gain in population of one person every 10 seconds). While the flailing economy hit certain segments of the wireless ecosystem hard esp. the infrastructure and handset segments, consumers haven’t really pulled back on the mobile data overall spending. Additionally, the CAPEX spending will stay strong in 2009 given the activity around 3G/4G deployments and trials. As expected, there was an increase of prepaid subscribers which dropped the overall revenues for some of the carriers.

As we mentioned in our last two research notes that this time around, the fate of the US mobile industry is more closely tied to the overall economy compared to the previous recessions. As the consumer sentiment improved over the last 3-4 months along with better than expected Q1-2 2009 earnings from corporations, the mobile industry is back on track. While the structural flaws in various industry segments remain, and the economy is a crisis away from the double dip, the outlook for the remainder of 2009 remains bright and we are expecting the overall data revenues to now increase by 32% compared to 2008 with a record-setting Q4.

US Wireless Industry in Recession - The light at the end of the tunnel is indeed not from the oncoming train

Note: For a detailed discussion of the US wireless industry in recessions, please see 2008 US Wireless Market Update.

Q2 2009 reported a much better 1% decline (compared to 6.4% in Q1). On an yearly basis, the GDP is expected to change by 3.2% for 2009 and the service revenues are expected to account for 1.13% of the US economy by year-end.

As mentioned in the previous reports, while in the past, the recession hardly impacted the wireless industry, this time around; it is going to be more tied to the recession. In the past couple of months, the consumer sentiment has improved and the Q109 earnings have been better than expected. While there are still many structural flaws in the financial and housing industries and the unemployment is at a 25 year high of 9.4% (though it dropped in July from 9.5% in June), consumers are feeling better about the economy and their own prospects in it.

Given that consumer sentiment is improving, it is clear that the US mobile data market is all but back from the recession. While some segments within the mobile industry might be suffering, there has been an increase in spending overall.

What to expect in the coming months?

We noted in our Q3 2008 note that we will get a better picture of the impact of the recession on the wireless industry in Q109 as it was the first full quarter after the seasonal holiday quarter. There are two micro trends that are clear. First, as expected, due to the high unemployment, the data card segment took a hit. It is starting to recover in due course as more of the workforce comes back over in the next 18 months.

Also, as expected, there was a shift from postpaid to prepaid in some user segments. For example, for T-Mobile, prepaid constituted 82% of the net-adds in Q209 up from 61% in Q109 and 21% in Q208. It is not clear if the good times will bring back the prepaid subscribers to the postpaid realm or like the consumers who are canceling their landline connections and moving to mobile, these customers will get used to savings and the prepaid lifestyle. The fight for the low-end customer is also having an impact on the traditional prepaid players and the price pressure is reducing their margins.

The landline replacement by Mobile trend continued now reaching almost 24% by Q209. Messaging continues to grow. The messaging volume was up 15% and messaging revenue was up 11% QoQ. The data access (excluding data card) including flat rate data plan subscriptions have also show significant strength lately. In addition to smartphones, we are also seeing increased mobile data activity amongst feature phone users. With its expanding 3G network, T-Mobile like its peers has started to benefit from smartphone penetration reaching to 6% of its subscriber base. Overall, the US market will exceed 25% penetration of smartphones in Q3 2009.

The increased use of smartphones and datacards is putting a pressure on carrier networks and accelerating their strategies to deploy LTE/WiMAX. We estimate that by end of 2009, the US mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 400 petabytes, up 193% from 2008. To truly tackle the problem head-on, operators will need to adopt a multi-pronged strategy to manage their traffic more effectively. We discuss mobile data traffic in much more detail in our paper “Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era.” (I will be giving keynotes on the subject at the Mobile Innovation Week in Sept and at the ISACA meeting in Oct)

The positive factors are helping negate the negative factors and given the strength of 3G and smartphone adoption, the increase in activity on the appstores front, and in general, a better awareness of mobile data services and applications amongst consumers, any decline due to the loss of data card revenue and postpaid transition to prepaid accounts has been taken care off. In particular, Verizon and AT&T have done really well. Smartphones remain a bright spot, which in turn has a direct positive impact on the data revenues. Even with the decline in handset sales, smartphone segment will continue to increase in 2009 accounting for almost 30% of the overall device shipments.

There is also a concerted effort underway to move beyond the traditional subscriptions and expand the mobile universe to wireless-enable other consumer devices (What did your refrigerator say to your microwave while you were gone?).

Coming back to the 2009 forecasts, we are raising our estimates for the mobile data service revenues to $45B for the year. We will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q209 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues (Slides 11-12, 17-18)

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 7% Q/Q to $10.6B in Q209. Compared to Q208, the data service revenues grew 30%.
Verizon and AT&T accounted for 90% of the increase in data revenues in Q2 2009.
The US mobile data service revenues crossed $10B for the second straight quarter and stays ahead of Japan and China by a distance.
Verizon and AT&T experienced the most growth with over 8% increase Q/Q followed by T-Mobile at 6%.
Verizon’s data revenues are now almost $4B/quarter only inches behind the global leader of over 10 years NTT DoCoMo.
AT&T and Verizon now account for 69% of the market data services revenues and 61% of the subscriber base. Sprint had the fifth consecutive quarter of data revenue growth.
The average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU is now $27%. US market is likely to touch the 30% mark in 2009.
The top four US carriers are now a permanent fixture in the top 10 global operators by mobile data service revenues occupying #3, #4, #6, and #8 spot respectively. Apart from NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile, Verizon Wireless and AT&T are the only two other operators generating more than $3B in quarterly mobile data service revenues.

ARPU (Slides 13-15)

Overall ARPU decreased by $0.23 thus reversing the trend of the last three quarters. Average voice ARPU declined 13-15by $0.45 while average data ARPU grew by $0.68 or 5% and easily negated the drop in voice ARPU.
Sprint led in data ARPU with $15.5 followed by Verizon at $14.96. In terms of % contribution, Verizon led with 29.28% followed by AT&T at 28.74%.

Subscribers (Slides 16-17)

In Q209, the US market added approximately 2.8 M new subscriptions down 6% from Q109.
The number of data subscribers has been on the rise with Verizon leading the way. At the end of Q209, 65% of US subscribers were using some form of data services.
The messaging volumes in the US market now average almost 540 messages/subscriber/month or at the frequency of almost at a message/hour/sub thus reaching close to the messaging leader Philippines.
In terms of net-adds, thanks to the boost from the iPhone, ATT led in Q209 with 1.4M net-adds, edging its friendly rival Verizon which added 1.1M net subscriptions. T-Mobile net-adds reduced to 325K while Sprint lost 214K.
The 3G penetration in the US stays at a healthy 40%+ in Q209. Verizon led the pack while T-Mobile is slowly expanding its 3G coverage. The growth in 3G and smartphones is helping offset some of the downward pressure on the data revenues and overall ARPU. (I will be moderating a panel “Ultraband: A Fast Platform For Innovation” at GigaOM’s Mobilize in Sept. We will discuss the future of broadband and its implications)

Applications and Services

Non-messaging services continue to grab 50-65% of the data revenues for the US carriers.
The flat-rate pricing movement that was started by Willcom in Japan which moved to Europe became more prevalent in the US market with industry wide flat-rate pricing plans that included data. All the major carriers seem to be offering flat-fee access plans for most of the new smartphones being introduced in the market. Approximately 18% of the consumers have flat-rate data plans.
There are probably 18-20 sub-segments within mobile data services and consolidation looms. While the valuations are still high for rapid consolidation, we think that due to recession pressure, the M&A scene is starting to heat up.
The usage and data consumption trends are enabling carriers to accelerate their 4G plans and develop long-term business and technical strategies (We will be discussing the state of the industry and what lies ahead at the inaugural “Mobile Breakfast Series” on Sept 22nd in the panel discussion “State of the Union: Where do we go from here”)
The appstores battle is intensifying with OEMs and carriers are announcing their plans and some of them are opening their wares to woo the developer community. In the midst of the appstores hoopla, Apple announced the passing of the 1.5 Billion download mark with increasing number of developers participating the ecosystem. The new functionality being released with 3.0 is taking the battle up a notch. The clear-cut business model of 30/70+ split is attractive to the long-tail of developers. While there is no dearth of applications, findability remains a challenge. Also, appstores are changing the monetization strategies for content and application developers and the industry is trying to figure out what “Open” means in the long-term. (Will be discussing this and more at CTIA in Oct)
The App vs. Mobile Web discussion reached a surprisingly new crescendo. The evolution is pretty clear - for the applications that don’t require significant UI resources, it will be better to develop in for the browser, for intensive games, the native platform will be ahead of the browser advances. The location API access on the iPhone browser is breakthrough to have developers start thinking about the webapps. But, what does it do to the revenue model? (I will be moderating two panels on the subject in Nov at the Open Mobile Summit)

Handsets

After falling below the 100M/quarter level in Q1, Nokia rebounded to sell 103M units in Q2 09. Samsung also exceed 50M with a strong second finish at 52M. LG finished a strong third with almost 30M in its bag and Motorola showed signs of strength by selling close to 15M units.
The second quarter was dominated by two blockbuster launches of iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre. While iPhone continued to attract new customers, Pre suffered from a less than stellar launch strategy. By lowering the 3G device price to $99, Apple set the new bar in smartphone pricing leaving the rivals scrambling for response. T-Mobile launched another Android device last month.
The growth in smartphone usage is also putting pressure on the networks which are not able to handle the load during peak times in certain cities thus forcing carriers to look for alternate strategies to satisfy the demand for broadband - usage billing, UMA, Femtocells, Hotspot buys, WiMAX, LTE, and others.
Rest of 2009 is eagerly awaiting the release of Palm Pre, several Android handsets from HTC, Samsung, Motorola, and others, Windows devices along with follow on of Danger devices, new model(s) of iPhone, and other touch screen devices.

Misc.

Not surprisingly, Venture capital market experienced a continued decline in thefirst half of 2009, with companies announcing $1.2B in financings vs. $1.6B for 2H08 and $2.1B for 1H08. (Source: Rutberg)
In a sign of convergence battles to come, T-Mobile’s @Home and various Femto cell initiatives are taking hold. Cable operators are also aggressively seeking triple-play by providing the wireless component of the service.
China crossed the 700M subscription mark last month. In terms of net-adds, India has outpaced China for every single month of the last one year. The Indian market added almost 140M vs. 100M in China during the last four quarters. (more discussion on the international market in our global market update next month)

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds, future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Oct 2009. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Sept 2009.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Should you have any questions about navigating or understanding the economic and competitive icebergs, please feel free to drop us a line.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

New WhitePaper: Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era July 14, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, Carriers, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, Indian Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, MVNO, Mergers and Acquisitions, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Mobile Users, Networks, Smart Phones, Speaking Engagements, Strategy, US Wireless Market, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 2 comments

Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era

Executive Summary

In Q1 2009, the US market exceeded $10B in quarterly mobile data service revenues for the first time. The subscription penetration in the US is well past 90% and the mobile data usage is on the rise. While the rate of new subscriptions has slowed, the pace of innovation is going very strong. It is quite apparent that the mobile industry is going through a significant transition from voice to data, from making calls to getting lost in applications and from voice communications to multimedia communications. Helped by the ever expanding wireless broadband networks, and release of hit devices every quarter, and consumer’s insatiable appetite for information and content has brought us to the surge of a data tsunami that will shake the industry to its core.

As everything moves to digital, information repositories across the web are almost doubling every day moving rapidly to the yottabyte (YB) era. The information and the desire and the capability to consume oodles of data is increasing exponentially. As a result the traffic – both Wireline and wireless is also increasing at a predictably fast rate.

In 2009, the global yearly mobile data traffic will reach a new milestone – 1 Exabyte(EB) or 1 Million Terabytes (TB).By 2016-17, the global yearly mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 1 Zettabyte (ZB) or 1000 Exabytes. By 2014, in the US alone, the total yearly mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 40 EB. How do you go about managing such growth in a profitable manner when the cost of supporting such traffic will increase exponentially despite the move to 4G? Will the move to LTE offer some respite?

This paper discusses the analysis done by Chetan Sharma Consulting on the growth of mobile data traffic in the US market and how the ecosystem can apply some strategies to manage growth and profits. We built detailed models to estimate the rise of mobile data network traffic and discuss some solutions to handle such growth in this paper.

Download Paper

Your feedback is always welcome.

Should you have any questions about navigating or understanding the economic and competitive icebergs, please feel free to drop us a line.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this paper are our clients.

Introducing "Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era" July 10, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, Carriers, Devices, European Wireless Market, Indian Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Speaking Engagements, Worldwide Wireless Market , 2 comments

Yesterday at the TiE Seattle keynote, I introduced some research from my upcoming paper “Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era.” See coverage here.

I will be releasing the paper next week. In the meantime, here is the Introduction

In Q1 2009, the US market exceeded $10B in quarterly mobile data service revenues for the first time.[1] The subscription penetration in the US is well past 90% and the mobile data usage is on the rise. While the rate of new subscriptions has slowed, the pace of innovation is going very strong. It is quite apparent that the mobile industry is going through a significant transition from voice to data, from making calls to getting lost in applications and from voice communications to multimedia communications. Helped by the ever expanding wireless broadband networks, and release of hit devices every quarter, and consumer’s insatiable appetite for information and content has brought us to the surge of a data tsunami that will shake the industry to its core.

As everything moves digital, information repositories across the web is almost doubling every day. The information and the desire and the capability to consume oodles of data is increasing exponentially. As a result the traffic – both Wireline and wireless is also increasing at a predictably fast rate.

In 2009, the global yearly mobile data traffic will reach a new milestone – 1 Exabyte (EB) or 1 Million Terabytes (TB). [2] By 2016-17, the global yearly mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 1 Zettabyte (ZB) or 1000 Exabytes. By 2014, in the US alone, the total yearly mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 40 EB. How do you go about managing such growth in a profitable manner when the cost of supporting such traffic will increase exponentially despite the move to 4G?[3] Will the move to LTE offer some respite?

[1] Source: US Wireless Data Market update Q1 2009, Chetan Sharma Consulting. It was also the first time any nation exceeded the $10B mark in a quarter for mobile data revenues.

[2] For reference, 1 TB = 10¹² bytes, 1 PB = 10¹⁵ bytes, 1 EB = 10¹⁸ bytes, 1 ZB = 10²¹ bytes, 1 YB = 10²⁴bytes

[3] For the purposes of this paper, we consider LTE as a 4G technology though it hasn’t been officially designated as such. For more discussion on 4G, please see 4G: The State of the Union, Chetan Sharma, GigaOM, 2009

Future in Review (FiRe) 2009 roundup May 31, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, Carriers, European Wireless Market, IP Strategy, Indian Wireless Market, Infrastructure, Intellectual Property, International Trade, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, Mergers and Acquisitions, Microsoft Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , add a comment

Over the course of last year, I did 25 different events, all of them focused on mobile. However, there was one event that truly stretched my thinking and worldview and that was the “Future in Review” conference (see last year’s review here) hosted by Mark Anderson, CEO of Strategic News Service (SNS). It exposes one to multidisciplinary subjects from global warming to nuclear weapons, from oceanography to medicine, from mobile to cloud, from economics to space rockets, it’s all here, nicely packed in a 3 day conference.

FiRe 2009 started with a brilliant keynote address from Prof. Veerabhadran Ram Ramanathan, Distinguished Prof of Climate Sciences and Director who is quite possibly the most authoritative person on the subject of climate change. He started his work way back in the 70s, decades before Al Gore made it glamorous. He is the one who has been measuring the impact on our planet one measurement at a time. He took us through the journey of his career culminating with a stark warning and a message of hope.

ram

Things have deteriorated to such an extent that if we don’t check the downward spiral, many of the significant sources of water such as the Gangotri Glacier in India will disappear in 10-15 years. If you stop and think about it - that’s just stunning and has calamity written all over it. If the source of Ganges disappears, the life that has built around the river for thousands of miles before it goes into the Bay of Bengal will be unsustainable. I grew up in Roorkee, a town on the banks of the Ganges, so the point hit home very strongly. I have been thinking about this issue since the PBS documentary “On Thin Ice” by David Brancaccio and Conrad Anker - one of world’s leading high altitude climbers. 75% of the world’s fresh water is stored in glaciers and at the current pace of destruction, within 15-20 years most will be severely depleted. And there are still people in high places who don’t get it.

It was not all doom and gloom but a ray of hope in his experiments that left us less depressed by the end of the keynote. He is working on a number of experiments to identify and cure the main sources of pollution and carbon in the atmosphere like the Project Surya to reduce air pollution and global warming by cooking with renewable sources. Or the unmanned drones (pictures above) to measure brown cloud particulate composition to get a handle on how pollution travels (did you know that it only takes 2-3 days for pollution in China to come over the US and then another 2-3 days to reach Europe and the cycle continues - pollution is flat and globalized - thinking that it is only a developed world problem or developing world problem is foolish, also foolish is waiting on the other party to move first).

Best wishes to Ram and his team to educate, illuminate, and find solutions to the toxic problem of our times.

(with Mark Anderson)

Next day we moved into the full-fledged conference mode with 30 min rapid fire sessions from 8-5. The morning started with Mark talking to Stephen Evans of BBC World Service (he is a great interviewer btw) about how we recover from the current crisis and if technology will lead the rebound? Answer is Yes! and we are already seeing signs of it and others in the industry like Bill Gates and John Chambers have been echoing the same thing as well. Later Mark interviewed Mark Hurd, CEO of HP who had a hard time sitting on his feet so the discussion was done standing up.

(Mark and Mark)

He emphasized that the future is in the packaging of software, services, hardware, and network rather than siloed solutions. Haven’t we heard that before. Hurd is a numbers guy and can recite P&L spreadsheet from memory. He suggested that we will see more of the same for the reminder of the year and that the services business is yielding good profits for HP now. There was also quite a bit of discussion on the latest buzz word “Cloud Computing,” what it means and how does everyone profit from it.

Several industry heavyweights like Werner at Amazon, Amitabh at Microsoft, Russ Daniels at HP were at hand to discuss what CC means to them. While there is a lack of industry consensus on the meaning, it more and more looks like the reallocation and redistribution of resources - physical and electronic in a manner that drives efficiency and cost reductions for startups to behemoths. From a consumer point of view, it will always be a blend of solutions that take into account the privacy and security of data. My recent hard drive failures has forced me rethink my backup strategy.

(My panel on the future of Wireless Broadband - Fred, Chris, David, Hugh, and Rama)

Later in the day, I had the privilege to host the only mobile session of the conference “The Future of Wireless Broadband” with five amazing panelists, Dr Fred Kitson, Corporate VP, Motorola, Chris Pearson, President, 3G Americas, Dr. Hugh Bradlow, CTO of Telstra, Dr. Rama Shukla, VP, Intel, and David Achim, President, SkyFiber. I have written about the subject in great detail over the last couple of years so it was great to bounce some questions to the best minds in the space. Highlights of the discussion:

Hugh, ever a purist, defined 4G as 100Mbps.
Not a surprise, but the latest surge of smartphones is causing the networks to panic and follow the upgrade path esp. for HSPA+, LTE, and WiMAX
Rama said that 4G is more about the business model than about the technology. A business model that enables and opens up the ecosystem at a low price thus fostering innovation and services in an accelerated way
Hugh added that it is also about the spectrum as what’s available and how it can be utilized for new services, new technologies, and new business models
Being a provider of the backhaul technology (a choke point in the network evolution), David discussed how the backhaul technology will need to be upgraded at an accelerated pace if we are to deliver 10Mbps+ speeds.
Fred brought in the perspective from the device and infrastructure provider and they are doing well with both WiMAX and LTE and that newer devices with much enhanced capabilities will drive more demand for bandwidth as well as the need to optimize applications to conserve batteries (which is another areas that needs innovation and breakthrough)
Chris gave a summary of the LTE efforts of operators around the world with folks like Verizon accelerating their rush to 4G due to end of lifecycle of EV-DO while others like ATT are pursuing a slightly slower approach trying to maximize the output from HSPA+.
Hugh has been playing with newer set of “alternate devices” like sensor networks, telemetry, projection glasses and so on and so forth and sees their importance in the growing ecosystem.
Australia is dedicating $43B to broadband expansion to 90% of the consumers in the country. An equivalent US investment will be close to $350B and we are investing $7B (stimulus package). As I have said before, the stimulus package was a huge missed opportunity and the govt. could have done much better.
The flat rate economy is not sustainable and something has to give in the future
The availability of broadband impacts consumer behavior and we are likely to see very diverse models and services emerge in the coming days

There were other host of areas I wanted to get into but you can only do so much in 30 minutes especially if you have great panelists. Wish I could have a day long session to discuss the nitty-gritty in much more detail. In any case, great panel and insights. Joe Sterling was at hand as well to do an artist rendition of our panel, art below.

As I mentioned before, the conference was filled with very interesting discussions like Ambassador Dennis Hays from Thorium Power discussing a world where the capacity of making nuclear weapons can be taken out of the nuclear materials to only focus on nuclear energy for energy purposes. Boy! won’t that change the geo-political dynamics. John Hagel talked about shaping strategy based on this recent HBR paper and his upcoming book on the subject.

Another highlight of the show is to gather the bright CTOs of leading corporations and give them a practical problem to solve like how to provide adequate safe water for future decades. Hosted by David Brin (cohost of TV ArchiTechs series), the panel delved into understanding the problem and delivering a framework for solutions. Not a typical session you see at a conference. Hey CTIA! how about putting together a problem solving panel for your next show?

I also was touched by the screening of the movie “The Cove” - winner of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. More details here. Synopsis:

In the 1960’s, Richard O’Barry was the world’s leading authority on dolphin training, working on the set of the popular television program Flipper. Day in and day out, O’Barry kept the dolphins working and television audiences smiling. But one day, that all came to a tragic end.

The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos, tells the amazing true story of how Psihoyos, O’Barry and an elite team of activists, filmmakers and free divers embarked on a covert mission to penetrate a hidden cove in Japan, shining light on a dark and deadly secret. The mysteries they uncovered were only the tip of the iceberg.

Visit the Movie home page

It will change your perspective of how you view dolphins for ever and those trips to seaworld will be ever so more poignant filled with self-introspection. More power to the activists like Richard O’Barry and directors like Louie Psihoyos for opening our eyes and making a remarkable piece despite the challenge.

Another highlight of the conference is the interviews of top technologists and emerging startups by BBC’s Stephen Evans. Each gets a sound byte to wow the world (the session is streamed to 150M people). Highlights - Xerox - how can we solve legal cases with technology? Radar Networks - NOW is the unit of change. Vlingo - Speech is changing. IMANI-Ghana - SMS to prevent drug counterfeits, Cisco - virtual reality, voice, and data are the three different waves of innovation, the opportunity for collaboration is immense, Liberty - 5 yr projection 1Gbps wired, 100Mbps wireless peak throughputs, avg - 200Mbps for wired and 10Mbps for wireless, Microsoft - it will be the Chinese century, companies shouldn’t worry about protecting their marketshare in China but worry about protecting their share from Chinese players overseas, Smaato - Mobile Advertising is going to be the most prevalent business model in mobile, and SIMtone - make terminals dumb again and have the network cloud take care of everything.

The current financial crisis was also discussed at length. Many thought Europe is in denial and lack fundamental understanding of the crisis, that China and US are intertwined more than ever before and will have to work together to lead the world out of the crisis, India is largely untouched and better days are ahead thanks to the recent electoral results.

(Larry with Kamran, Mark with Elon)

Larry Brilliant suggested that the vaccines are the best investment in human history. Can’t argue with that one. He also suggested that the world should be thankful to Mexico for releasing the data early and often enough for other countries to take precautionary measures (sometimes to the extreme, I might add). They have suffered significantly and have been ridiculed but hopefully they serve as a lesson for the world in future pandemics.

If FiRe represents the best in multidisciplinary thinking, Elon Musk represents the rare breed of multidisciplinary entrepreneurs. The guy can shift from intricacies of electric cars to the design of rocket ships to solar energy with ease.

My best session was at Calit2. I think Larry Smarr has the best office with many 10Gbps links and coolest toys to play with, especially the 125Mpixel Hyperwall. It was also nice to interact with Michael Sims, Manager and Planner for the Mars Rover at NASA and his team using the network and the wall. You can see some cool images below. The second set of pictures are an image of human brain where you can pick out the single neurons with ease.

Also, interacted with the next generation surface and touch technology that uses pressure as an input as well. Below is me doing a destructive face surgery on a poor soul.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the 0-60 mps in 3.9s experience in Tesla Roadster. That car is a rocket.

Overall it was a great conference. I left more curious about more things. The conference also has an intimate feel to it where you can discuss burning issues with top experts and award winners over coffee, stroll, and meals. Registration for 2010 is open now.

TiECON Conference Roundup

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, Carriers, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , add a comment

While I have been involved in various TiE events over the years, this was my first TiECOn down in the bay area. Even in this economy, this was a very well attended event with folks coming in from around the globe. The conference was quite diverse as well covering consumer web, internet infrastructure, cleantech, wireless, and software. I was there to moderate a panel on Wireless Monetization.

I was able to attend some really good keynotes, the most notable being Paul Maritz who talked about platforms, Tony Hsieh of Zappos on happiness, and Reid Hoffman, Linkedin. I found Martiz address on platforms and how the successful ones are generally created particularly interesting. He had some inside stories to share about Intel and Microsoft and how “accidental fortitude” seems to be the key of what became the changing platforms for our industry. Planning often doesn’t work that well when create mass-market phenomenon. The next areas of innovation and profits are: microfinance, biotech and information personalization.

What was unique and distinct about this conference was the “level of energy” amongst the entrepreneurs and participants. Despite the funding and economic climate, these guys were rushing to form the new company, start a new chapter, and create something unique in the market place. Some were serial entrepreneurs while others were just getting started.

The central theme of the conference was - if you were going to start a new business, this is the year, now is the time. While it has become a cliche, it is indeed true, best businesses are started in recessions and in the downturn - sometimes out of need other times out of opportunities. Bright brains rally and congregate to shake the cobwebs and look towards a new beginning. The energy was indeed infectious. My own consulting practice started during the last recession and 8 years later we are still around, so i say, all power and glory to the next generation of entrepreneurs who will create new technologies, paradigm shifts, and business models.

50 Startups were awarded the TiE50 awards - http://www.tiecon.org/home/tie

058

On to my panel - “Wireless Monetization - The Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow.”

My thanks to Arvind Gupta, Asha Vellaikal, and Savinay Berry for being the hosts and putting together the panel. Also, thanks to Ramneek Bhasin and Ujjal Kohli for their assistance.

The panelists were:

Michael Bayle, former Sr. Director, Mobile Monetization, Yahoo

Purnima Kochikar, Director, Nokia

Gary Kovacs, SVP, Sybase

Matt Litz, VP, Glu Mobile, and

Tina Unterlaendar, MD, AKQA

My questions were simply around what makes money, what’s working, and what’s coming? The brilliant panel had terrific insights.

Bottom line:

Appstores are a way to experiment with pricing, gives users more control
Different appstores might require different strategy for promotion, pricing needs to remain consistent across appstores, rev-shares with operators need to remain consistent
Mobile Advertising is in its infancy, budgets mostly in experimental campaigns but the potential remains huge. The biggest problem is reach and fragmentation
In the flat world, one must think of how the solutions will be adopted around the world not just in the developed nations
India and China are the volumes business, get used to it
Consumers are always looking for free so there is continuous price pressure, one has to consider alternate pricing or monetization strategies
Companies like mig33 have been successful in alternate modes of monetization, advertising is a smaller piece of the puzzle
Days of using mobile to purchase physical goods is coming
Mobile Payments using NFC is still a far cry for the US market

Overall a great panel and a great conference.

US Wireless Data Market Update - Q1 2009 May 11, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, CTIA, Carriers, Devices, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Mobile Users, Networks, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 4 comments

US Wireless Data Market Update - Q1 2009

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http://www.chetansharma.com/usmarketupdateq109.htm

Executive Summary

The US wireless data market grew 5% Q/Q and 32% from Q108 to reach $10B in mobile data service revenues. It marked the first time the US market has crossed the $10B milestone. Given the strong growth in data revenues shown by the top carriers and the increase in service revenues overall, it appears that at least for the time being that the worst is over for the mobile industry. In summary, the recession has been all but a tiny blip (from the service revenue perspective) in its growth trend and the US mobile market has weathered the downward spiral in economy better than its counterparts in other developing nations.

The US subscription penetration went passed 90%. While the flailing economy hit certain segments of the wireless ecosystem hard esp. the infrastructure and handset segments, consumers haven’t really pulled back on the mobile data overall spending. Additionally, the CAPEX spending will stay strong in 2009 given the activity around 3G/4G deployments and trials. As expected, the data card subscriptions were hit the hardest and there was an increase of prepaid subscribers which dropped the overall revenues for some of the carriers.

As we mentioned in our last research note that this time around, the fate of the US mobile industry is more closely tied to the overall economy compared to the previous recessions. As the consumer sentiment improved over the last couple of months along with better than expected Q1 2009 earnings from corporations, the mobile industry seems to be back on track. While the structural flaws in various industry segments remain, and the economy is a crisis away from the double dip, the outlook for the remainder of 2009 remains bright and we are expecting the overall data revenues to now increase by 24% compared to 2008.

US Wireless Industry in Recession - The light at the end of the tunnel might not be of the oncoming train

Note: For a detailed discussion of the US wireless industry in recessions, please see 2008 US Wireless Market Update.

The % GDP change dropped from 4.8% in 2007 to 2.3% in 2008. Q4 2008 reported a drop by 6.2% QoQ in one of the sharpest declines in the last quarter century. Q1 2009 reported a 6.1% decline. On an yearly basis, the GDP is expected to change by 3.2% for 2009 and the service revenues are expected to account for 1.13% of the US economy by year-end.

As mentioned in the previous report, while in the past, the recession hardly impacted the wireless industry, this time around; it is going to be more tied to the recession. In the past couple of months, the consumer sentiment has improved and the Q109 earnings have been better than expected. While there are still many structural flaws in the financial and housing industries and the unemployment is at a 25 year high of 8.9%, consumers are feeling better about the economy and their own prospects in it. Most companies are being optimistic but cautious.

Given that consumer sentiment is improving, it appears that US mobile data market is all but back from the recession. While some segments within the mobile industry might be suffering, there has been an increase in spending overall.

What to expect in the coming months?

We noted in our Q3 2008 note that we will get a better picture of the impact of the recession on the wireless industry in Q109 as it was the first full quarter after the seasonal holiday quarter. There are two micro trends that are clear. First, as expected, due to the high unemployment, the data card segment took a hit. It will recover in due course as more of the workforce comes back over in the next 18 months.

Also, as expected, there was a shift from postpaid to prepaid in some user segments. For example, for T-Mobile, prepaid constituted 61% of the net-adds in Q109 up from 57% in Q408 and 25% in Q108. It is not clear if the good times will bring back the prepaid subscribers to the postpaid realm or like the consumers who are canceling their landline connections and moving to mobile, these customers will get used to savings and the prepaid lifestyle.

It is quite likely that 50-60% of such consumers don’t go back to postpaid thus permanently lowering the ARPU base for such customers and carriers who have experienced more postpaid to prepaid shift will have to make up for the lost revenues someplace else (or maybe they can hire Oprah to send a tweet to her followers to upgrade to Postpaid. It will crash the system but increase the ARPU).

Rising unemployment continues to accelerate another trend - landline replacement by Mobile which reached almost 22% by Q109 (of course this benefits the mobile industry). This trend is irreversible and requires fresh thinking.

Messaging continues to grow. The messaging volume jumped 27% and messaging revenue was up 7% QoQ. The data access (excluding data card) including flat rate data plan subscriptions have also show significant strength lately. In addition to smartphones, we are also seeing increased mobile data activity amongst feature phone users.

This will lead to new business and pricing models for e.g. some will find the low flat rate pricing untenable in the long-run without a fundamental rethink of the network and business architecture.

Coming back to the 2009 forecasts, we are raising our estimates for the mobile data service revenues to $42B for the year. We will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q109 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues (Slides 11, 18)

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 5% Q/Q to $10B in Q109. Compared to Q108, the data service revenues grew 32%.
It marked the first time the US mobile data service revenues crossed $10B. It is also the first time any country has reported a $10B quarter (for mobile data services).
Thanks to the Alltel acquisition, Verizon’s data revenues grew the most - 18% QoQ and 46% YoY. AT&T experienced a 39% lift while T-Mobile reported a 24% increase in YoY data revenue growth.
Last quarter AT&T surpassed Verizon in data revenues for the first time since 2005 and in Q109 Verizon duly took many of titles back from AT&T becoming the number 1 carrier in almost all the categories.
AT&T and Verizon now account for 68% of the market data services revenues. Sprint had a fourth consecutive quarter of data revenue growth.
The average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU is now $26%. US market is likely to exceed the 30% mark in 2009.
The top four US carriers are now a permanent fixture in the top 10 global operators by mobile data service revenues occupying #3, #4, #6, and #8 spot respectively. Apart from NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile, Verizon Wireless and AT&T are the only two other operators generating more than $3B in quarterly mobile data service revenues.

ARPU (Slides 12-15)

Overall ARPU decreased by $0.91. Average voice ARPU declined by $1.17 while average data ARPU grew by $0.26 or 2% and couldn’t negate the drop in voice ARPU.
Sprint led in data ARPU with $15 followed by Verizon at $14.16. In terms of % contribution, Verizon led with 27.91% followed by AT&T at 27.2%.

Subscribers (Slides 16-17)

In Q109, the US market added almost 3M new subscriptions down 33% from Q108.
The number of data subscribers has been on the rise with Verizon leading the way. At the end of Q109, 62% of US subscribers were using some form of data services.
The messaging volumes in the US market now average 485 messages/subscriber/month or at the frequency of a message/sub every 1.5 hours. The leading messaging nation is Philippines where consumers routinely send a message/hr on average.
In terms of net-adds, Verizon led in Q109 with 1.3M net-adds, edging its friendly rival AT&T which added 1.2M net subscriptions. Sprint losses reduced to 180K subscribers.
With its Alltel acquisition, Verizon became the number one carrier in the US easily overtaking AT&T. It now has 86.6M subs and secured the bragging rights to being the biggest operator in the Americas.
The 3G penetration in the US went past 40% in Q109. Verizon led the pack while T-Mobile is slowly expanding its 3G coverage. The growth in 3G and smartphones is helping offset some of the downward pressure on the data revenues and overall ARPU.

Applications and Services

Non-messaging services continue to grab 50-60% of the data revenues for the US carriers. For the first time the non-messaging share exceeded 60%.
The flat-rate pricing movement that was started by Willcom in Japan which moved to Europe became more prevalent in the US market with industry wide flat-rate pricing plans that included data. All the major carriers seem to be offering flat-fee access plans for most of the new smartphones being introduced in the market. Approximately 17% of the consumers have flat-rate data plans. We will see a further acceleration of this trend aided by the recession.
There are probably 18-20 sub-segments within mobile data services and consolidation looms. While the valuations are still high for rapid consolidation, we think that due to recession pressure, the M&A scene is starting to heat up.
The usage and data consumption trends are enabling carriers to accelerate their 4G plans and develop long-term business and technical strategies (I will be moderating a panel on “The future of Broadband” at the “Future in Review (FiRE)” conference on May 20th in San Diego where some of the best minds on broadband will be debating the evolution of our industry)
The appstores battle is intensifying with OEMs and carriers are announcing their plans and some of them are opening their wares to woo the developer community. In the midst of the appstores hoopla, Apple announced the passing of the 1 Billion download mark with increasing number of developers participating the ecosystem. The new functionality being released with 3.0 is going to take the battle up a notch. The clear-cut business model of 30/70+ split is attractive to the long-tail of developers. While there is no dearth of applications, findability remains a challenge. Also, appstores are changing the monetization strategies for content and application developers (I will be moderating the panel “Wireless Monetization” at TiECON on May 16th in Santa Clara)
Slowly but surely, mobility is becoming pervasive across industry verticals. Mobile Health looks very promising and the impact could be global. (I will be participating in a conference on mHealth being held in San Francisco on May 22nd by UN Foundation, Vodafone Foundation, UCSF Global Health Services, Berkley Engineering, Cisco, and NetHope)

Handsets

After selling over 100M units for seven straight quarters, Nokia slipped to 93M handsets in Q109, still more than the next three players combined but an 18% drop from Q408 nevertheless. Samsung and LG have been really gaining on their rivals in the past year and are now at #2 and #3 respectively. Motorola and Sony Ericsson with 6% share each round up the top five.
While Apple has been stealing all the press, RIM upped the ante by claiming leadership in the smartphone wars by outselling Apple in the first quarter of the year.
The growth in smartphone usage is also putting pressure on the networks which are not able to handle the load during peak times in certain cities thus forcing carriers to look for alternate strategies to satisfy the demand for broadband - metered billing, UMA, Femtocells, Hotspot buys, WiMAX, LTE, and others.
Rest of 2009 is eagerly awaiting the release of Palm Pre, several Android handsets from HTC, Samsung, Motorola, and others, Windows devices along with follow on of Danger devices, new model(s) of iPhone, and other touch screen devices.

Misc.

Not surprisingly, Venture money in the mobile sector experienced a rapid decline. Compared to Q108, venture financing declined by 58%. (Source: Rutberg)
In a sign of convergence battles to come, T-Mobile’s @Home and various Femto cell initiatives are taking hold. Cable operators are also aggressively seeking triple-play by providing the wireless component of the service.

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Aug 2009. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Sept 2009.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Should you have any questions about navigating or understanding the economic and competitive icebergs, please feel free to drop us a line.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

Global Wireless Data Market Update - 2008 April 28, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, Carriers, European Wireless Market, India, Indian Wireless Market, International Trade, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, M&A, MVNO, Microsoft Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Mobile Users, Mobile Wallet, Music Player, Networks, Strategy, US Wireless Market, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 1 comment so far

Global Wireless Data Market Update - 2008

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http://www.chetansharma.com/globalmarketupdate2008.htm

Executive Summary

The Global Wireless Markets continued to grow rapidly especially in India and China where the carriers (together) are adding over 20M new subscriptions every month. India crossed the 400M subscription mark this month while China whizzed past 650M in Q109. Overall, the global subscriptions penetration edged past 60%. During 2008, revenues further tilted towards data services, increasing 17% from 2007 EOY. The overall global mobile revenues (including equipment) for the year reached the 1 Trillion dollar landmark in 2008, with over $830 billion attributed to services revenues. Data revenues now account for over 20% of the global service revenues.

For some leading operators, data is now contributing close to 40% of the overall revenues. However increase in data ARPU is not completely offsetting the drop in voice ARPU for most operators. From the true and tested SMS messaging to the new services such as Mobile Advertising, Social Networking, Commerce, Mobile Wallet, and others, different services helped in adding billions to the revenues generated in 2008. The US market expanded its lead over Japan in mobile data service revenues for the year and is unlikely to cede ground in the months to come.

The success of Apple’s Appstore (1B downloads in 9M across 37M devices is not surprising but still impressive, look for another growth bump in July) led to appstore mania across the ecosystem with every major player in the ecosystem holding ambitions for Applesque success leading to healthy competition and hopefully more innovation. Google’s Android also kept the industry chatter on the high with a slew of new devices slated for 2009. The ease of use of applications developed for G1 on the new devices will define Android’s role in the ecosystem. If successful, it will decimate the weaker ones from the equation going forward.

WiMAX vs. LTE debate took over the EV-DO vs. WCDMA talk and while the majority of the industry is consolidating around LTE; open-platform advocates are watching the arrival of WiMAX with great interest. However, the down economy is delaying the establishment of Clearwire’s nationwide footprint.

Chetan Sharma Consulting conducted its semiannual study on the global mobile data industry. We studied wireless data trends in over 40 major countries - from developed and mature markets such as Japan, Korea, UK, and Italy to hyper growth markets such as China and India.

This note summarizes the findings from the research with added insights from our work in various global markets.

Service Revenues

US extended its lead over Japan as the most valuable mobile data market in service revenue with US adding $34B vs. $29B for Japan in 2008. China with $15.8B was ranked number 3. US registered the highest growth amongst the top 3 with over 40% increase from EOY 2007 levels followed by Japan at 25% and China at 21%.
The top 10 nations by service revenues are: US, China, Japan, UK, France, Italy, India, Germany, Spain, and Russia.
The top 10 nations by data service revenues are: US, Japan, China, UK, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Australia, and Korea.
NTT DoCoMo continues to dominate the wireless data revenues rankings with over $4B in data services revenue in Q408 and almost $15B for the year. Almost 42% of its overall revenue now comes from data services. DoCoMo also crossed the 90% 3G mark last month.
NTT DoCoMo was followed by China Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, KDDI, Sprint Nextel, Softbank Mobile, T-Mobile USA, O2 UK, and China Unicom to round up the top 10 operators by wireless data service revenues. It marked the first year for T-Mobile USA to be in the top 10 list as it went past SK Telecom. All the top 10 carriers exceeded $2B in data revenues for the year 2008.
The top 10 global operator groups now account for over 60% of the global mobile data revenues.
For the last couple of years, NTT DoCoMo has been the only carrier exceeding $10B in yearly mobile data revenues. In 2008, as expected it found company with China Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and ATT in the exclusive $10B club. KDDI missed out by a whisker.
Data revenues for the top 10 operators increased 27% from EOY 2007 and now account for almost 48% of the global mobile data revenues though their subscriber share is around 30%.
The biggest jump in data revenues was experienced by the US carriers – ATT and Verizon Wireless respectively. They were followed by China Mobile. (For a complete US Market Update, please see our Q208 research note).
NTT DoCoMo regained its position vis-à-vis KDDI w.r.t. mobile data revenues. Their data coordinates stand at ($27, 42%) and ($25, 38%) respectively.
Most of the operators in developed nations are contemplating future strategies to boost data revenues such that the decline in voice revenues is at least compensated for. There are very few operators who have experienced increase in overall ARPUs. Comparing the ARPU for last 2 years, amongst the top operators, only Singtel, Rogers, T-Mobile UK, O2 Germany, O2 UK, Verizon Wireless and ATT experienced increase in both overall and data ARPU.
China reported approximately $16B in data revenues for 2008 and the percentage contribution is around 27%, data ARPU is around $2. For India, data ARPU continues to stay around $0.50 as most of the new adds are voice only subscribers and there is continued price pressure in the market.
China Mobile remains the most valuable telecom operator with over $180B in market cap. It is followed by Vodafone at around $98B. Telecom groups in mature markets are under enormous pressure to either come up with a global expansion strategy or accelerate their existing plans. The current recession has slashed their market caps by 20-30%.
In 2008, SMS’s vice like grip on data revenues continued to loosen a bit with many carriers seeing an increase in non-SMS data revenues. On an average, Japan and Korea have over 70-75% of their revenue coming from non-SMS data applications, US around 50-60%, and Western Europe around 20-40%.
NTT DoCoMo has been at the cutting edge of the mobile data evolution by creating new markets and exploring new technologies and social experiments ahead of almost anybody else in the market. We looked at the data revenue growth at NTT DoCoMo since the introduction of i-Mode almost 10 years ago. During the last 9 years, overall ARPU has declined 33% though data ARPU increased over 1800% and now accounts for almost 40% of DoCoMo’s service revenues. The voice ARPU has declined almost 60%. Our long history with the Japanese and Korean markets has taught us that while the individual strategies in each market will differ, one should study the trends and technologies in these markets to get a sense of what’s coming.

ARPU

Most of the major operators around the world have double digit percentage contribution to their overall ARPU from data services. Operators like DoCoMo, and Softbank are over 42%. KDDI, 3 Australia, 3 Italy, 3 UK, O2 UK, Singtel, and 3 Sweden exceeded 30%.
ATT reported the highest increase in data ARPU from 2007 with 32% growth. Other notable percentage increases in ARPU were from KDDI, DoCoMo, Softbank Japan, 3 Australia, Vodafone Italy, Rogers, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile Austria. The biggest drop in percentage terms were registered by the Indian operators with average data ARPU dropping to $0.50. In terms of absolute dollar amount, NTT DoCoMo leads the pack with $27 data ARPU.
The biggest percentage contribution by data ARPU has been consistently registered (since mid 2002) by two Philippines carriers – Smart Communications and Globe Telecom with over 56% (or $3) contribution coming from the data services. Philippines is also one of the most active messaging nations where users average a message/hr round the clock.

Subscriptions

The global mobile markets continue to grow at an explosive pace touching 4B subscriptions by 2008 up 23% from EOY 2007 levels and will likely cross the 5B mark in 2010. Overall the global mobile subscriptions now represent over 60% of human population on Earth.
China and India continued their red-hot growth throughout 2008. Combined, they added 212.8M new subscriptions with India edging China by 15% for the first time in yearly net-adds.
Earlier this month, India also crossed the 400M subscriptions mark, only the second nation to do it after China. In total, China is still years ahead. In the meantime, US crossed the 90% subscriptions mark earlier this year.
In March, India edged past the US to become the number two wireless market (by subscriptions) in the world. In the last two years alone it has added almost 175M new subscriptions (in comparison China added 169M and the US market added 39M). For the past 7 months, India has been displaying Phelpsesque like flair in setting and beating its world record for 6 times, twice exceeding 15M/month net-add. For the last 7 months, the market has been exceeding 10M net-adds/month with Mar 09 being at a whopping 15.6M making it a record for monthly net-adds in a given country at anytime in the history of the industry or any industry for that matter (breaking its previous record set in Jan09).
In the last 10 years, the growth patterns in the mobile industry have completely reversed. In 1998, the developed world accounted for 76% of the subscriber base, in 2008; the percentages have flipped with developing world now accounting for 76% of the subscriber base and are likely to increase to 85% by 2018.
The top 10 nations by subscriptions are: China, India, US, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Germany, Japan, and Pakistan.
China Mobile with 457M (as of Dec 08) remains the #1 carrier in terms of the total number of subscriptions followed by Vodafone at 255M and Telefonica with 196M subscriptions. América Móvil, Telenor, China Unicom, T-Mobile, Orange, MTS, and Bharti Airtel are the next five largest telecom groups in the world.
As far as 3G is concerned, there were over 400M 3G users (72% of them are WCDMA users vs. EV-DO). Both Japan and Korea continue to expand their 3G base with both reporting over 90%+ penetration.

Others

Messaging still accounts for the lion-share of data service revenues. However, other services such as Mobile Music, Mobile TV and video streaming, Voice navigation, PNDs, Mobile Games, IMS, LBS, Mobile advertising, and others have gradually chipped away the share from messaging. Alternate devices with wholesale cellular agreements are also flooding the market. In Japan, Mobile Commerce is expected to do much better than Mobile Advertising. Though not much talked about, enterprise applications are also being adopted widely esp. in North America as more workers become mobile and corporations seek efficiencies in their operations and supply-chain.
Nokia eclipsed 100M/quarter unit sale in each of the four quarters. It has sold over 468M handsets in 2008 (up 7.2% from 2007), more than the next three handset manufacturers combined. Nokia’s global market share stayed in the 38-41% range. Samsung at 15%, Motorola with 9%, LG with 9.3% and Sony Ericsson with 8% rounded out the top five. Despite the slowdown, the industry eclipsed 1B in handset sales in 2008 and will do so again in 2009.
China and India represent the biggest opportunities for the Infrastructure providers. China launched 3G across the three operators earlier this year. India is also going through its 3G spectrum policy and is likely to resolve some of the contentious issues shortly. Some of the biggest infrastructure contracts are coming from these two countries as they look to expand coverage into rural areas.
Deployment of 3.5G technologies is in full swing. However, it is the discussion of 4G that is occupying the headlines. Many larger operators have laid out their plans for deploying LTE starting next year. Meanwhile, Clearwire has been rolling out its WiMAX network, one market at a time.
While the talk of “Open Access” and “Open Platform” consumed much of North America, it barely registered a decibel elsewhere. Several significant events including 700 MHz Auction, Android, and Verizon’s “Open Network” initiative elevated the consternation in the ecosystem. Apple launched its 3G iPhone and Android’s first device was introduced in the form of T-Mobile G1. Many more Android devices are slated to be released in 2009.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

Ps. We will have an update on the impact of recession on the mobile industry in our US Q109 update next month.

Behind the Millennial Advertising Numbers April 17, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Search, US Wireless Market, Worldwide Wireless Market , 5 comments

Earlier today Millennial Media released the numbers form their mobile advertising ad network for the first time and it quite interesting data for everyone to take a look at, esp. the advertisers.

First, let’s quickly talk about the numbers. From the Q109 numbers, for the US market, it seems like Millennial outpaced other ad-networks including perhaps Admob (only Jan and Feb numbers are available as of this writing) as Millennial surpassed 10 Billion impressions for the quarter.

Thus, officially, we have a horse race.

But more importantly, Millennial’s numbers reveal something rather interesting, the stuff we have been talking about for sometime. In fact, we had a whole chapter in our book discussing the 5 Point Framework for Mobile Advertising: Reach, Engagement, Targeting, Viral, and Transactions. Here are some of the case studies we discussed in the book

So far, industry has been enamored with “Impressions” only. We had argued that the quality of advertising increases as you start including other factors in the technology and design of campaigns.

The graph that really caught my eye is below: (all graphs below this point are copyright Millennial Media)

The Audience refers to the user population that is built based on behavior and related attributes. The value is high and the performance is three times the average. Compare this to Channel (news, sports, etc.) targeting or more generic run of the network categories and you see a significant performance lift for the advertiser and a revenue boost for the value chain. And it looks like because of the performance, the Audience category dominates in Millennial’s network.

Another interesting data is what happens post-click. Impression alone means little though only mobile it is till many times better than online but we need to figure out how users interact (or get them to interact) once impression is landed and the figure below shows the distribution. Once you start comparing various campaigns and variables, a really interesting pattern will emerge which essentially will be the best practices for the industry.

I think the best part is the measurement of user session or time which is key to the engagement metrics. Millennial reported 4:48 minutes of average user session time (90th percentile). Also, 58% requests used some level of geo info for targeting which is quite good. The handset mix was more distributed compared to the Admob network and the carrier share provided some interesting glimpse into the ecosystem as well (Sprint leads the pack). Device input mix shows the how touch devices are starting to make an impact on the device ecosystem.

Overall great educational material for all in the mobile advertising ecosystem to see what is happening at a granular level. I hope other networks will also publish their traffic details and we will also start to get more metrics around Targeting, Virality, and Transactions, so we can learn what works under what circumstances. This will give all the ammunition the advertisers and agencies need to wake up their analog counterparts.

Next Step - Standardization and Auditing.

Carnival of Mobilists #169 April 12, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, CTIA, European Wireless Market, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Speaking Engagements, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 7 comments

Last week at CTIA in Las Vegas I had the opportunity to meet many of my friends and colleagues, old and new. Such events remind us that it is the people you associate with that makes our industry vibrant and exciting. This week, it is my pleasure to showcase and celebrate the thinking and work of my friends, many of whom I have known for many years. Most have written important books for our industry and others have at least a tome in them.

Picture Tomi T Ahonen 3G Strategy Consultant, his book Services for UMTS out in March 2002 My Photo

Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media: Cellphone, cameraphone, iPhone, smartphone Product Details Cover image for product 0470239530

In no particular order, they are:

First up is Ajit Jaokar, co-author of recent book “Social Media Marketing,” discussing an important issue of opening up the carrier network. He writes an in-depth post on how telecom companies should be thinking about open as we get into the 4G era. Very Interesting commentary.

Tomi Ahonen is one of the most prolific writers I have come across in the wireless industry. He has written more words than many read in a lifetime. Off late, our industry has been wondering if they will ever be able to monetize mobile social networking. Tomi in his usual flair points through case studies and examples, a way forward. Also, checkout his indispensable Pearls series.

At CTIA (BRIC event), I was impressed with the discussion of Zeebo by Mike Yuen at Qualcomm. Martin Sauter, author of Beyond 3G, an important book of the evolving ecosystem, writes about Zeebo: Gaming for the next billion.

Russ Buckley, a tireless advocate of Mobile Advertising and all things mobile pens a very interesting piece by tweaking George Orwell’s classic “1984.” Pour your tea and dive into the post.

Judy Breck, author of several books including the latest - Intertwingle, is the energy behind the Carnival who keeps all of us straight. She is also a big proponent of learning and education. A big cheer for her. She talks about Russ Buckley’s post on the new Sprint’s commercial.

Lately, our industry has been consumed by 4G. Volker Hirsch takes a look at how 4G might influence the mobile gaming environment.

Ernest Doku of Omio.com also writes about the theme that Ajit picked up - Should networks fear Skype?

James Cooper at mjelly summarizes the key iPhone app stats.

Andrew Grill, a great evangelist for the mobile advertising industry discusses the recent survey by KPMG which has some key insights into the mobile ad market.

Barbara Ballard, author of Designing the Mobile User Experience and an important voice of reason in the mobile industry writes about her latest initiative on mobile SEO. Check it out and contribute.

Tam Hanna looks at the Symbian ecosystem from a developer’s point of view.

James Pearce of dotMobi raises some interesting thoughts regarding mobile maps.

My own 2c to the conversation is in the form of my CTIA 2009 Roundup.

You can catch many of the the colleagues listed above at the upcoming Future Technologies Conference on April 24th.

Finally, a shout-out to our friends at MOMO Amsterdam. They host some of the best MOMO events anywhere in the world and have a great line-up coming up on June 1.

I will encourage you to add these blogs to your RSS feed, follow these guys on twitter, chase them at conferences, and call upon them when in doubt.

Next carnival is going to be hosted at TamsBlackberry. Be sure to create and submit your best posts.

Until next time, best wishes.

CTIA 2009 Roundup April 6, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, CTIA, Carriers, Devices, European Wireless Market, IP, Indian Wireless Market, International Trade, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, Mergers and Acquisitions, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Speaking Engagements, Strategy, US Wireless Market, Unified Messaging, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 1 comment so far

CTIA 2009 Roundup

http://www.chetansharma.com/ctia2009.htm

CTIA 2009 in Pictures

CTIA provided a boost to the Las Vegas economy by hosting the 2009 International CTIA in the sin city. Prior to the show, we knew that the attendance will be down due to the economy and it was clear from day 1 that it will be a less busy event. Attendance was probably down 30-40%, Exhibitors seemed down by a good percentage as well with many opting for meeting rooms instead or skipping the show altogether. The big double story compounds were downgraded to smaller fields. Samsung and LG didn’t plaster the town with massive banners, taxis weren’t covered in advertisements. It was not all bad though, the probability of being trampled by humans reduced, taxi lines were shorter (though no less annoying) and the quality of the show was still pretty good. We had a jam packed schedule. This note summarizes the observations from the show.

Numbers CTIA released its semi-annual numbers. For 2008: 270M subscribers, $148 billion in service revenues, $32 billion in data revenues (just for reference, this is more than the total global Hollywood box-office revenue which came in at $28B), 2.2 trillion in MOU, 1 trillion TXT messages. You can checkout our annual US data market analysis which was released last month here.

Etech Contest – Prior to the event, CTIA invited us to judge the Emerging Technology Contest. It was fun reviewing the various entries. The award winners are announced here. Congrats to all.

My CTIA started early with a couple of sessions at the pre-conference event - BRIC Mobile Market Summit. The quality of the discussion was pretty good. I gave a talk on the Opportunities in the Indian and Chinese mobile markets and discussed where the opportunities in these two fastest growing markets as well as dispel some myths that engulf most companies.

After that, I joined the panel with other experts in the industry to have a lengthy discussion of the trends and opportunities in these markets including Latin America.

Unfortunately, our workshop on “Monetizing Mobile User Generated Content” got canceled due to low attendance or maybe folks are just not interested in monetizing these days. I will be discussing some of the similar themes in my talk at the NAB Show (MES) in Vegas on 22^nd April. I will also be moderating a panel on Innovations in Mobile Experiences.

If interested, clients of Chetan Sharma Consulting can request the slides from any of the talks.

Themes: The main themes of the conference were: Broadband (primarily around 4G and LTE with sprinkles of WiMAX) and data usage, Green, Mobile Health, Appstores, Rich Communication and Social Networking.

Broadband

4G – My first 4G project was back in 2003 for NTT DoCoMo when 4G didn’t even enter industry’s vernacular. Most operators were figuring out their 3G strategies. Six years hence, we have come a long way. Broadband, 4G, and LTE were the core themes of the conference and there was visible progress from the last CTIA with more test results, actual devices, and real demos. While the current reports suggest that some form of deployment will take place in 2010, we don’t expect the “real” commercial deployments before 2011, LTE voice will even take longer. So, where does this leave WiMAX. With each passing day, the role of WiMAX as a niche technology is affirmed. The backhaul bottleneck problem is also becoming prominent and the enhancement of backhaul is behind the RF infrastructure to provide any substantive improvements in data throughputs at least in the near future.

I will be moderating a panel on 4G at Future in Review (FiRE) conference considered by Economist the best Tech conference on the planet (panelists include executives from Telstra, Qualcomm, Clearwire, and others) to get delve deeper into the evolution of 4G.

The Broadband Stimulus – Many companies are eying the $8B broadband stimulus package. The process of how they are going to be granted seems chaotic with unintended consequences. My feeling is that it is a lost opportunity. Instead of just looking at incremental enhancements, US could have been bold and improved existing and new broadband deployments by over 50-60 times. (More discussion here)

Mobile Health

Keynotes – I thought Dr. Eric Topol, Director, Scripps gave perhaps the most effective keynote addresses in recent memory. Keynotes are generally a drab affair. Instead of inspiring through vision many put the audience to sleep with their product announcements. Dr. Topol’s speech was so rich in content, his words were filled with such passion, and his articulation was so inspiring that most entrepreneurs in the room were energized to make a difference. I commend CTIA for inviting him. He is joining Qualcomm’s Don Jones (a fierce proponent of mHealth) and others to form the first ever Wireless Health Institute in San Diego. Expect some really cool stuff to come out of them. However, to be most effective, health institutions need to get on board with the program starting with the simplest of things like “txt messages.” Come on folks, move into the 21^st century!

Health – For the first time, there was significant discussion on mobile’s impact on the health care industry. My masters is in Biomedical Engineering so it is great to see the marriage between the two industries. I strongly believe if we can get past some of the bureaucratic nonsense, mobile can have a significant lasting impact on the quality of life and healthcare in both the developing and developed nations. Some of the stuff is really amazing (iBrain, iPill, iShoe, you get the picture). I will have more discussion on the subject in the coming days.

Applications and Services

You say appstore, I say appworld, you say market, I say marketplace – I have been working on appstores for so long that I can’t help but be amused by the recent frenzy of appstores sprouting like mushrooms. I think overall it is good for the industry as each of the providers will push each other in areas of innovation and pricing models thus opening up the industry for developers and consumers. However, the fragmentation also increases as a result and something has to give because developer’s attention and resources are finite. There aren’t many companies who can pull-off a successful developer program (this is one area where Microsoft has some advantage because of significant experience in cultivating developers). Apple’s model has already forced carriers to accelerate their short-term and long-term strategies. T-Mobile USA saw the writing on the wall earlier than most and is further along in its plans. Current implementations are still quite primitive with much potential for improvement.

Rich Communication – Talked to some companies (Aylus, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, etc.) about rich communication services that integrate various experiences on the mobile device including chat, voice, data, social networking, video, etc., onto a single screen. The user experience is enhanced leading to newer sources of revenues for operators.

Netbooks also seem to be on operator roadmaps with 33% of these devices expected to be sold through the carrier channels in 3 years. Will Nokia and Motorola get active in this space? Or will the new entrants use netbooks to enter the phone market? Inspired by Kindle, many players are getting bolder and investing in application specific devices (a trend we wrote about in our mobile advertising book last year). Examples: a cool new wireless video game console – Zeebo being launched in Brazil and nuvifone being launched by Garmin and Asus.

Mobile Social Networking – Some interesting social networking features and functions are coming down the line. I am convinced that carriers need to treat social networking as a core service rather than a bolt on application. I almost wrote a book “The Facebook Effect” but 3 books in a year were too many so taking a break for now. (Maybe the next one will be “The Twitter Effect”).

Mobile Advertising – Though we have been involved with several mobile advertising projects, at the show, it felt the segment excitement was quite flat and many companies are struggling to stay in business. The consolidation hasn’t come yet but things are likely to start changing in the next few months. I also think that industry needs to start thinking about much more compelling and engaging closed-loop creative experiences rather than just impressions. Also, third party verification is needed (who is going to step up?). Finally, the role of the mediation layer is becoming important. The real substantive announcement came before CTIA with four major US operators agreeing to collaborate on best practices. Kudos to MMA for orchestrating the agreement.

Green

Green is the new black – With so much focus on cleantech and global warming, vendors are stepping up and making a dent in the carbon put out by the industry. There were some really cool solar chargeable devices as well as applications that keep the users green-aware. Being green is a competitive advantage.

Miscellaneous

Devices – The quality of devices that coming out keeps getting better. Stuff coming out from Samsung, LG, and INQ is pretty darn cool (Motorola, Nokia, Palm have some good stuff coming out as well). There were some neat concept phones on display as well (I know, I know, we are ways out but I think we will see some of these come to light sooner than we think). I thought one of the coolest new device was from LG – GD900 with transparent keypad. Samsung’s DLNA and AMOLED based devices were also quite good. They were also showing the WiMAX Smartphone Mondi. ZTE is also planning to enter the US market in a big way. While new Androids were hard to spot, several of them are scheduled to be released in the next few months.

NTT DoCoMo – Each CTIA, I love spending time in DoCoMo’s booth as they are always at the cutting edge of what’s to come. Downloading your digital key to your handset to open your hotel room by waving your phone, controlling every piece of equipment in your home via your cell phone, i-concier: your friendly on-screen butler, separable phones were some of the highlights.

Best booth: Most Creative – SpinVox, Most Hip – LG

Interesting companies – While it is difficult to meet each of the upcoming startups, couple of companies caught our attention: Waze out of Israel with its crowd-sourcing based approach to real-time traffic information and Kovio with its ability to lower the cost of printed silicon.

3G connection – My 3G connection was so good throughout the show that I didn’t need to lug my laptop around and did 100% of my communications for 3 days from my phone.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks

Chetan

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

US Wireless Data Market Update Q408 and 2008 March 2, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, CTIA, Carriers, Devices, European Wireless Market, Indian Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, Middleware, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Search, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 2 comments

US Wireless Data Market Update Q408 and 2008

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http://www.chetansharma.com/usmarketupdate2008.htm

Executive Summary

The US wireless data market continued to ignore the recession doldrums in Q4 2008 and grew 7.3% Q/Q and 38.7% from Q407 to reach $9.4B in mobile data services revenues. In 2008, the mobile data services revenues reached our original estimate of $34B. Even as the global industry crossed 4B in subscriptions and $1T in total revenues, the nervousness due to the current recession has been palpable. While the flailing economy has started to hit hard on the wireless data ecosystem esp. the infrastructure and handsets segments, consumers haven’t really pulled back on mobile data spending overall, just yet. There are sub-segments within mobile data revenue stream that are starting to feel the pinch like data card subscriptions and downloadables. Also, in an event of a longer recession, the fate of the US mobile industry will be more closely tied to the overall economy this time compared to the previous recessions.

US Wireless Industry in Recession - A collision of two perfect storms

Back in 2005, we published a paper titled “3G - Hitting the Mass Market” in which we presented the case for an explosive market growth in the US market riding on the back of 3G and posited that by 2009, US will become the leading nation in terms of the number of 3G subscribers. As of 2008, US crossed 100M 3G subscribers catapulting ahead of all industrialized nations in terms of total subscribers (% penetration was around 40%). The paper was based on our work in various markets and study of diffusion trends in the global markets. That study became the subject of several articles and cover stories and was one of the central documents (including our testimony in the case and a report to the President) referred to in one of the most prominent wireless industry cases in front of the US International Trade Commission. Our basic thesis was simple - once you have the favorable ecosystem factors in place, the market is ripe for explosive growth.

2008 was a key year for growth in the mobile data services adoption in the US market. The confluence of 3G, better devices and the smartphones, and the applications ecosystem set the stage for tremendous growth. We already saw signs of significant user adoption and the market grew 7-9% QoQ each quarter in 2008. From almost being in the bottom-most square in 2005 (in our 9-box ARPU charts), US market gained strength to find itself amongst the leaders by the end of 2008 (more on this in our Global Wireless Data Market update for 2008 coming out later this month). At mid-2008 point, 2009 looked to be another year of growth and adoption.

However, the current recession is not your parent’s recession. The problems with the economy are so deep and its impact on the consumer spending and sentiment is so massive that most economists are scrambling to make sense of it. Nobody really has a firm grip on how to fix the current mess because a recession of this magnitude complicated by a globalized economy hasn’t occurred before, so there is no playbook to lean on. We might get lucky and things could turn around in a couple of quarters but things could also take a turn for the worst that might take many more quarters to recover. Markets are incredibly volatile and so are the consumers. All consumer confidence indices are down to their worst ratings ever (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index was down to 25 (on a relative scale of 100) to reach yet another all-time low in February (index began in 1967)).

So, we stand at the junction of two perfect storms - one that has the promise of an incredible surf to take the mobile industry to new heights while the other is hell bent on destroying everything in its path. Will the growth surf be strong enough to absorb the economic tidal wave? or will it set us back in time? or will we end up somewhere in between?

The answer lies in how quickly the consumer sentiment and market psychology improves and stays consistently positive over a period of 3-6 months. If the situation improves in the next 1-2 quarters, the recession will be all but a blip in the overall US mobile data market historic charts. If however, this downward spiral continues and the confidence in the markets is not restored, consumers will start cutting some of the discretionary mobile data spending, even cutting down some family lines, and downgrading of mobile plans (including data) at an accelerated rate. If it is the latter, we are in for a fundamental reset of the economy as Steve Ballmer eloquently outlined in his talk to the Democratic Caucus in Feb.

Impact on the US Wireless Industry during Recessions (Slides 11 and 12)

The current recession is not the first one that the US wireless industry has faced but it is quite different this time around. The first one came in 1990 and lasted for one year and the second came amidst the dot-com bubble and terrorist attacks in 2001 and lasted for two years. Historically and logically, GDP and consumer spend is closely correlated. When the economy contracts, so does the consumer spending. A look into the income elasticity of demand indicates a change in consumer mobile services demand as a result of drop or change in consumer income. Different patterns of consumer demand emerge in different countries depending on the state of the industry during the specific downturn.

To put things in perspective, US represents 21% of the global economy and the US services revenue represents 1.1% of the US economy as of 2008. In access of 70% of the US economy is linked to consumer consumption so you can see the tight linkage between the GDP and the consumer spending (the US consumer spending alone is more than the economies of China and India combined).

If we compare the US GDP data to the mobile services revenues and subscriber data, there is some correlation during recessions i.e. service revenues contract but the state of the industry was quite different around on previous occasions. The % change in mobile services revenues and subscriptions went down with the drop in GDP in both instances and recovered as the GDP pulled back after the recession. During the first recession, mobile was a niche service. By 2001, mobile had passed the inflection point on to become a mass-market phenomenon but data services market was largely non-existent. By 2008, the US mobile market had matured with high-degree of subscriber penetration and mobile data had become a healthy and vibrant industry.

Let’s look at how the mobile industry behaved in the various recessionary periods over the past two decades.

1990-1991 The % GDP change (GDP compared to previous year) dropped from 5.8% in 1990 to 3.3% in 1991. The mobile services revenues % change dropped from 36% to 26% over the same time period, the subscriber % growth dropped from 51% to 43%. Subscriber penetration at the end of 1990 was around 3%. Given the smaller base, the drop in mobile numbers can be partially attributed to the fact that as the % subscriber penetration grows the % change numbers come down anyway. In 1992, when % GDP jumped to 5.7%, the % change in mobile services revenues and total subscribers jumped to 46% and 37% respectively, thus quickly reversing the downward trend.

2001-2003 The % GDP change dropped from 5.9% in 2000 to 3.2% in 2001. Over the same period, % change in mobile services revenues dropped from 31% to 24% and % change in total subscribers dropped from 27% to 17%. However, as you would see in slide 11, these numbers have been slowly dropping regardless of the recession as the subscriber and revenue base grew. The subscriber penetration in 2000 was 39%.

2007- The % GDP change dropped from 4.8% in 2007 to 2.3% in 2008. Q4 2008 reported a drop by 6.2% QoQ in one of the sharpest declines in the last quarter century. The nature of this recession is quite different as well. While the previous recessions were limited to certain segments of the overall economy, the current recession has touched almost all sectors with a vengeance. The subscriber penetration at the end of 2008 was 89%. The overall ARPU stayed pretty steady around $50 between 2001 and 2008, while data ARPU became a growing component of the overall mobile services revenue.

What to expect in the coming months?

As we noted in our Q3 2008 note, in some sense, the Christmas quarter might have masked some of the microtrends within the mobile data segment of the industry though Europe started to feel the pinch in Q4. If one looks deeper into the sub segments, as we contemplated in our Q3 research note, it is clear that the layoffs are having an impact on the data card revenues (which account for approx. 10-12% of the overall mobile data revenues in the US) as the enterprises are dropping access cards with employees. Downloadables revenues were down from some segments of the user base as discretionary spending tightens.

Also, there was a shift from postpaid to prepaid in some user segments. For example, for T-Mobile, prepaid constituted 57% of the net-adds in Q408 sharply up from 23% in Q407 (though Suncom subscriber base probably has something to do with it). Rising unemployment has accelerated another trend - landline replacement by Mobile which reached almost 20% by Q408 (of course this benefits the mobile industry). This trend is irreversible unless new experiences can be introduced.

Messaging continues to grow. The messaging volume jumped 15% and messaging revenue was up 5.5% QoQ. The data access (excluding data card) including flat rate data plan subscriptions have also showed significant strength offlate. In addition to smartphones, we are also seeing increased mobile data activity amongst feature phone users.

The key question is - will the increase in the mobile data subscriber base nullify the loss in data subscriptions? and the answer seems to be - likely yes. But, if the job losses continue at the current rate, we will start to see flattening of data revenues in Q109 for some operators and a gradual decline over the course of the year. We have already started to see infrastructure (operators are slowing down 3G/4G investment) and device segments (replacement cycles are getting longer) getting hit pretty hard. Smartphones remain a bright spot, which in turn has a direct positive impact on the data revenues. Even with the decline in handset sales, smartphone segment will continue to increase in 2009 accounting for almost 30% of the overall device shipments.

As we eluded to earlier, another factor at play is the growth in 3G and smartphone penetration in the US market, both of which have been responsible for increasing the usage and hence the data revenues. At the end of Q408, 3G penetration was approximately 40% and the data penetration had reached 60%. Smartphone penetration has been inching up as well. In fact, all the service providers and OEMs have been targeting sub-$200 price point, which seems to be a good sweet spot for consumer adoption. The above two factors have also been helping negate any cancellations or downgrading of data plans.

We are likely to see continued price and margin pressure on subscription plans and as a result, voice ARPU will continue its downward trend and data ARPU will become a more prominent factor of the overall ARPU mix by the end of 2009. The longer the recession lasts, the more permanent the shift in voice ARPU becomes. Customer retention will edge customer acquisition. Same would be true with the consumer behavior and expectations. This will lead to new business and pricing models for e.g. some will find the low flat rate pricing untenable in the long-run without a fundamental rethink of the network and business architecture.

The percentage contribution to the overall ARPU from data reached almost 25% in 2008 and is likely to exceed 30% by the end of 2009. For the first time since 1998, the voice ARPU dip below $40 in the US.

During the last downturn, the likes of Google emerged. These players didn’t have much to do with the mobile market at the time but have gradually put their indelible stamp on the future of the industry. It is almost certain that new media and telecom models will emerge as a result of the current crises with new players shaping the next decade of the mobile industry.

Whether this recession invites regulatory intervention remains to be seen. Government can encourage mobile adoption by reducing taxes and fees on mobile services, avoiding unnecessary regulations, making more spectrum readily available, increasing competition, investing and incentivizing in mobile broadband.

Also, will the industry price or innovate its way out of this recession? The short-term knee-jerk reaction is to generally lean on price-differentiation but innovative services and business models can lay the ground work for a more sustainable differentiation and long-term benefits from new services adoption.

Coming back to the 2008 forecasts, our estimate of the mobile data revenues was spot on. The annual mobile data services revenue stood at $34B. We will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings. Q109 numbers will give us a better insight into the impact of the current recession on the US mobile industry and the global markets at large.

The bottom line is that in an event of a long and deep recession (i.e. beyond 2009), which I am afraid seems to be the case, the fate of the US mobile industry will be more closely tied to the overall economy this time compared to the previous recessions. If the consumer and market sentiment improves within the next 3-6 months, the mobile data industry will continue its rapid growth. Despite a difficult environment, we expect the mobile data services revenues to grow by at least 15% YOY in 2009.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q408 and 2008 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues (Slides 14 , 21, 22)

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 7.3% Q/Q to $9.4B in Q408. Compared to Q407, the data service revenues grew 38.7%.
AT&T’s data revenues grew the most - 12% QoQ and 52% YoY. Verizon experienced a 42% lift and T-Mobile saw a 30% increase in YoY data revenue growth. As expected, both AT&T and Verizon became two of the four operators to exceed $10B in data revenues for the year for the first time by (global) operators besides NTT DoCoMo (China Mobile is the other carrier to join the club).
AT&T surpassed Verizon in data revenues for the first time since 2005 though for the year Verizon still ended up being ahead for the third straight year.
AT&T and Verizon now account for 62.5% of the market data services revenues. Sprint had a third consecutive quarter of data revenue growth after falling behind its peers for the past couple of years.
The average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU reached 25%. In 2007, the percentage contribution stood at approximately 19.3%. US market is likely to exceed the 30% mark in 2009.
T-Mobile USA edged past O2 UK to secure the 8th spot in the top 10 rankings of global mobile operators by data revenues. For the year, Verizon and AT&T improved their rankings to #3 and #4 respectively at the expense of KDDI which dropped to #5. Sprint Nextel maintained its # 6 spot. AT&T and Verizon are in the select group of four global operators who are now generating almost $3B or more in data revenues/quarter (the other two are NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile).

ARPU (Slides15-18)

Overall ARPU decreased by $0.36. Average voice ARPU declined by $1.13 while average data ARPU grew by $0.77 or 6% but couldn’t negate the drop in voice ARPU.
AT&T led in postpaid data ARPU at $16.30 (or 27.35% of the revenues) followed by Sprint at $14.50 (or 25.89%).

Subscribers (Slides 19-20)

In 2008, the US market added almost 15M new subscriptions down 32% from 2007. Q4 also saw a decline from Q3 net-adds for the first time in recent memory.
The number of data subscribers has been on the rise with Verizon leading the way. At the end of Q408, Verizon had 74% of its subscribers using some form of data services. The messaging volumes in the US market now average over 110B messages/month or at the frequency of a message/sub every 2 hours. In comparison users in Philippines average routinely send on an average, a message every hour.
In terms of net-adds, AT&T led in Q408 with 2.1M net-adds, edging its friendly rival Verizon which added 1.4M net subscriptions. Sprint lost another 1.3M in Q408.
With its Alltel acquisition, Verizon became the number one carrier in the US easily overtaking AT&T. It now has 80M subs and secured the bragging rights to being the biggest operator in the Americas.
The 3G penetration in the US touched 40% in Q408. Verizon led the pack with over 65% 3G subscriber penetration. T-Mobile is slowly expanding its 3G coverage. The growth in 3G and smartphones is helping offset some of the downward pressure on the data revenues and overall ARPU.

Applications and Services

Non-messaging services continue to grab 50-60% of the data revenues for the US carriers.
The flat-rate pricing movement that was started by Willcom in Japan which moved to Europe started to take firm roots in the US market with industry wide flat-rate pricing plans that included data. All the major carriers seem to be offering flat-fee access plans for most of the new smartphones being introduced in the market. Approximately 15% of the consumers have flat-rate data plans. We will see a further acceleration of this trend aided by the recession.
There are probably 18-20 sub-segments within mobile data services and consolidation looms. Who will be the last man standing post the nuclear winter? While the valuations are still high for rapid consolidation, we think that due to recession pressure, the M&A scene will heat up by Q309.
Will Mobile Advertising be the rising star from the crisis or one of its victims? Clearly, there are a number of advertisers and brands that are scaling back on the experimental dollars thus shrinking the mobile ad spend. On the other hand there are some savvy brands that are pulling back from the traditional mediums like print which don’t really work and putting more money into digital including mobile. Mobile offers the best ROI of all mediums but there is lot of ground work to be done before it becomes a thriving advertising channel. In fact, for the mobile media and content ecosystem, mobile advertising lends very well to the belt-tightening trends. It will be interesting to see if operators use this opportunity to lay the foundations of a long-term mobile advertising strategy or ignore it completely. Stay tuned for some of our thoughts on the subject. Incidentally, this week marks the one year anniversary of our best-selling Mobile Advertising book. Our thanks to all the readers and companies who have adopted it into their education and sales curriculums and product strategies making it a worldwide success.
As we had mentioned back in July, Apple easily surpassed its 10M target in Q308 buoyed by its 100 country expansion plan. The broadband and appstore capabilities are quite attractive to consumers and it shows. VPN and direct access to Exchange is helping in getting many more users into the mix and making IT folks less apprehensive. The clearcut business model of 30/70 split is also attractive. While there is no dearth of applications, findability remains a challenge.
Apple’s success is inspiring carriers and OEMs to launch similar app-stores. Many operators launched an upgraded version of their existing Appstore offerings (and so did Google and RIM, even Microsoft and Nokia) along the lines of Apple’s initiative with promises of greater control to the application developers. However, many of such initiatives will fall flat due to weak developer ecosystems.

Handsets

Nokia eclipsed 100M unit sale in Q408 for the seventh straight quarter. It sold over 113M handsets in the quarter, more than the next three players combined. Nokia’s global market share stood at 38.6%. Samsung surged to 52.8M in handset sales for the quarter. For the year, the industry again eclipsed the 1 billion handset mark for 2008 and had a modest growth of 3.5% but the overall handset sales are likely to decline by 10-15% in 2009 (though still exceeding 1B).
The growth in smartphone usage is also putting pressure on the networks which are not able to handle the load during peak times in certain cities thus forcing carriers to look for alternate strategies to satisfy the demand for broadband - metered billing, UMA, Femtocells, Hotspot buys, WiMAX, LTE, and others. We deal with the whole topic of Wireless Broadband in great detail in our recently released book “Wireless Broadband - Conflict and Convergence” (IEEE Press/John Wiley). We will have more to say on the subject in the coming days and months.
Q4 also saw the launch of the fabled G-phone as G1 Google phone launched by T-Mobile in the US market and it is slowly making its way into Europe. While G1 is no iPhone, it introduced long-awaited features such as multiple processes, more open APIs, and others. Motorola, HTC, and others are said to be planning to launch more Android devices in 2009. The smartphone segment has clearly shaken up the market with Apple, Google, RIM, and Nokia being the main competitors. Microsoft appears to be waking up from its slumber and is rethinking its mobile strategy starting with an easy button.

Misc. (Slide 23)

Not surprisingly, Venture money in the mobile sector experienced a rapid decline. Compared to Q407, venture financing declined by 36%, and the yearly totals are 26% lower than what they were a year ago. (Source: Rutberg)
While WiMAX was launched with great fanfare with several key players participating in the investment pool, its long term prospects look uncertain as the delays in getting a nationwide network by a major operator in a major economy threatens the underpinnings of this nascent industry segment. To be relevant, the WiMAX fraternity needs to figure out some solutions in a hurry.
In a sign of convergence battles to come, T-Mobile’s @Home and various Femto cell initiatives started to take hold. Cable operators are also aggressively seeking triple-play by providing the wireless component of the service. Don’t be surprised by some acquisitions in 2009.

Preliminary Global Update (Slides 21-22)

China and India continued their red-hot growth throughout 2008. Combined, they added 212.8M new subscriptions with India edging China by 15% for the first time in yearly net-adds. India made mockery of the current economic climate by its unprecedented growth. In fact, for the past 5 months, India has been displaying Phelpsesque like flair (minus the pot excursion) in setting and beating its world record for 6 straight months. For the last 5 months, the market has been exceeding 10M net-adds/month with Jan 09 being at a whopping 15.4M making it a record for monthly net-adds in a given country at anytime in the history of the industry or any industry for that matter (we are still trying to figure out what led to such a jump).
NTT DoCoMo continues to dominate the wireless data revenues rankings with over $4B in data services revenue in Q408 and almost $15B for the year. Almost 42% of its overall revenue now comes from data services. DoCoMo also crossed 88% in 3G penetration in Q408 and will cross the 90% mark this week.
Most of the major carriers around the world have double digit percentage contribution to their overall ARPU from data services. Many operators are consistently exceeding 30% with DoCoMo and Softbank being over 40%.

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, future research reports, and articles. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in March 2009 and the next US Wireless Data Market update will be issued in May 2009.

To the 1% of you who have made it this far, thanks very much for your time and attention.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Should you need assistance in navigating or understanding the economic and competitive icebergs, please feel free to drop us a line.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

Is Kindle the new iPhone? February 10, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, IP Strategy, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, US Wireless Market, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 2 comments

Amazon is slowly but surely trying own the eBook market and has done well with its cautious Kindle launch. However, to have the platform universally adopted, there are still a number of short comings and challenges.

Price - It is still $160 overpriced. Not a mass market device just yet.

Book economics - There will be resistance from the publishers - the reach of the platform is not there so they are making it up in volumes

Beyond CDMA - To have a global subscriber base, amazon needs GSM variants quickly

Apple - iReader could blow out Amazon off the market if it doesn’t secure the market quickly

Google - They are getting the content digitized, they have the OS, they have the OEM partnerships, they have the biggest reach available to mankind, they have the analytics, they can deliver a knock-out blow

Amazon IMHO is making the classic market-reach miscalculation. They should go aggressive in seeding the market with the device and make money on the downloads. The bigger reach will enable them to experiment with some really interesting advertising business models as well.

Event Recap: PNWS (Vancouver) and Location Based Advertising (PARC) January 30, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, Carriers, IP Strategy, Indian Wireless Market, Location Based Services, Mergers and Acquisitions, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Search, Patent Strategy, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, Wi-Fi, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 2 comments

My event calendar this year started like last year - with a trip to Vancouver to attend Pacific Northwest Wireless Summit (PNWS) - the best wireless conference in Canada (18 and 19 Jan) . The weather was clear and sunny for a change, the drive beautiful, and the views from the conference rooms just drop-dead-gorgeous. The first day was Leadership summit where over 50+ C-level executives participated in discussing the state of affairs in the wireless industry and how to respond to the slumping economy.

Canada seems to be hit much harder than US by the slumping economy especially eastern Canada with the likes of Nortel struggling to survive.There were several interesting presentations and discussions. Some of the comments that stood out -

Steve Morley (former VP Qualcomm) - Qualcomm didn’t have any patents, any strategy, any product plan, any VC money but had a good group of people who figured things out. So, entrepreneurs shouldn’t feel disheartened and go with their dreams. The things that will get traction are - productivity tools, things that provide comfort, social connection tools, and simplifiers.

Wang Jing (Chair TD-SCDMA Forum, China) The ultimate battleground is LTE, TD-SCDMA is just a stepping stone to 4G. The mobile data market won’t pick up for the next 2 years

Laurence Dunbar (Partner, Fasken Martineau) Regulations can create new opportunities for new players and incumbents alike but it is important to understand the implications

Howard Donaldson (VP Disney) - It is very important to capture IP to maximize returns

I also moderated a panel on Global Opportunity - where are the opportunities and how to capture them. It is clear that certain segments are getting hit hard like Infrastructure and handsets, operators are also cutting back. Consumer data spending is still strong in the North American market as was evident form the strong AT&T and Verizon Q4 numbers. China and India are finally going 3G and some of the biggest contracts will be doled out.

China is pursuing a three technology strategy with China Mobile with TD-SCDMA, China Telecom with CDMA2000, and China Unicom with WCDMA. On the TD-SCDMA, China is trying to attract traditional OEMs to supplement Chinese OEMs but will the big boys invest in a technology that might not too long? To avail international opportunities, one has to understand the local market perfectly before jumping in. Despite the nuclear winter, there are new opportunities surfacing in various parts of the globe.

Next day, the full conference was in full flow with 6 interesting and diverse keynote addresses and panel discussion. Soundbites (courtesy PNWS)

During the session on Mobile Advertising, I presented my thoughts on the state of affairs of the mobile advertising ecosystem

I also wrote a small piece for the PNWS newsletter (below) based on our annual mobile predictions survey.

The best guesses for 2009
It’s that time of year again; time for predictions and forecasts for the year ahead. Chetan Sharma gives you some ideas based on the annual mobile survey conducted by Chetan Sharma Consulting with industry execs. Don’t miss Chetan live at PNWS where he will give you the inside track on mobile advertising and give you some insight on what consumers are thinking.

Despite the tough economy, overall, the mood is still optimistic that the mobile industry might be able to weather the storm a bit better than some of its counterparts.
There is predicted growth in prepaid subscriptions in the North American market.
Acceleration in the declining mode of downloadables already visible over the last few quarters.
The increase in the subscriber base will nullify the loss in data subscriptions, with the caveat that if the job loss rate increases substantially, there might be a flattening of data revenues in Q109 and gradual decline over the course of the year.
Continued growth in 3G and smartphone penetration especially in the western markets
Voice ARPU will continue its downward trend and data ARPU will become a more dominant factor of the overall ARPU mix by the end of 2009.
Wireless data is likely to help in carrying the wireless industry through these tough times; the global percentage contribution from data is likely to exceed 25% by the end of 2009.
OPEN will continue to be the buzzword for 2009 and Google is likely to set the agenda on “open” for others to follow.
While the overall advertising budgets will shrink, mobile advertising ad-spend will keep increasing from the 2008 levels. Targeting capability is increasing and CPMs are coming down making for a more efficient mobile channel for advertising. Brands are falling in two camps: one who are scaling down on inefficient channels like print and radio and moving money into digital including mobile and the others who don’t have quite the appetite for mobile and want to keep investing in channels that they are most comfortable with.
After many years of delay, India and China will finally start investing in 3G deployments with China focusing on TD-SCDMA/WCDMA and India on WCDMA.
Plans for mobile payments will get pulled back a bit due to economic crisis. Limited trials and rollouts will continue in western Europe and North America.
Infrastructure players are amongst the worst hit in the wireless ecosystem. Players like Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, and others are suffering. Will they continue to exist in their existing form or will a Chinese player see an opportunity to acquire them? Handset market is also seeing resetting of the landscape with the Korean manufacturers rising above Motorola to be counted amongst top three. The biggest infrastructure contracts will come from China and India this year but the majority of the $50B budget will be spent on TD-SCDMA equipment so the opportunity might be limited to local vendors with minor participation from global players.
Tough economic times are also ripe opportunities for M&A. Companies with cash will be able to swoop the struggling players who don’t have runway to survive 2009-10. We are likely to see several transactions and fire-sales.
Finally, though venture money is scarce, bear markets also give birth to new business models, new companies, new darlings of the wall street, and completely new opportunities and value propositions that weren’t envisioned before. Overall, consumer mobile data spending is expected to stay strong through this time economic cycles.
Good Luck and Best wishes.

Thanks to Michael Bidu for inviting me to participate.

Earlier this week, I headed down to Palo Alto to moderate a panel on Location Based Advertising being hosted by the Wireless Communication Alliance LBS SIG at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

Being involved in the wireless industry for almost 15 years, I used to follow the works of the legendary Mark Weiser, founder of the Ubiquitous Computing (UC) group at PARC and father of Ubiquitous Computing in general. His works and words have inspired many in the industry including me.

In fact, in 1999, when I was picking a name for our wireless practice at Luminant, Ubiquitous Computing was on the top of my list but I found myself explaining it the industry. We gradually changed to Pervasive Computing (which was also chosen by IBM around that time). People still found it hard to grasp the meaning, so I reluctantly changed (IBM also started de-emphasizing PvC) it to “wireless practice.”

Anyway, it was an absolute thrill and an honor to interact with the folks at UC at PARC and moderate a panel at PARC. There is so much computing history at PARC that even the walls seem to whisper UC.

The panelists were

– Brian Levin, Useful Networks
– Ujjal Kolhi, RhythmNewMedia
– Ilan Zorman, AdYouNet
– Blair Swedeen, Placecast
– David Turner, NAVTEQ

presenting different points of view regarding LBA. These guys have been around the block with location and advertising so it was a good spirited discussion. I have great respect for Ujjal (before Rhythm, he used to be CMO of Airtouch responsible for $250M/yr advertising budget), he has good insights into how advertising is bought and sold. Unlike the other panelists, Ujjal wasn’t particularly bullish on the LBA opportunity in terms of size and scale and thought it will be at best a niche play.

David talked about some interesting campaigns they have been launching on portable navigation devices from Garmin. Blair and Ilan talked about the differences with online targeting and how location targeting can improve performance. Brian from Useful Networks (I like the tag line - we take the BS out of LBS, neat!) gave some information about their European trials. Their role as location aggregator is being received well and they will have some numbers to announce next month in Barcelona.

Privacy was a common theme for the panelists, something that has to be done right or else the industry risks the regulatory hammer. We covered quite a bit in a short amount of time, yet there was still so much to discuss.

Thanks to Kurt Partridge for inviting me to help out with the event.

Mobile Industry Predictions 2009 January 1, 2009

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, ARPU, BRIC, CTIA, Carriers, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, Gaming, Indian Wireless Market, Infrastructure, Intellectual Property, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, M&A, MVNO, Mergers and Acquisitions, Microsoft Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Mobile Users, Mobile Wallet, Music Player, Privacy, Speaking Engagements, Strategy, US Wireless Market, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 3 comments

Mobile Industry Predictions 2009

2009 Mobile Industry Predictions Survey

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First things first. From all of us at Chetan Sharma Consulting, wish you and yours a very happy and prosperous 2009.

Before we get into what’s to come, let’s do a quick wrap-up of the year that was.

While 2007 was remembered as “the year of the iPhone,” in 2008, though iPhone and Appstore again dominated the headlines as “Touch” became the new black, iPhone shared the spotlight with Android and the resurgent RIM. The deafening roar of “Openness” that started to bubble up during Q407 permeated the ecosystem in 2008. Responding to the iPhone, OEMs raced to introduce Touch phones - Instinct, Armani, Storm, N2, Glimmer, Vu, G1, Diamond, Dare, N97, 5800, and others.

Apple reached its 10M goal a full quarter early and Gphone’s 1M number was impressive. The Clearwire deal was consummated though it meanders through the clouds of uncertainty. Blyk continued to defy expectations. We made significant headway in energizing the mobile advertising sub segment but the tough problems of privacy, education, control, fragmentation, and user experience remain. LBS picked up steam and mobility started to get into the alternate consumer device universe which with the help of Amazon kindle and PNDs have started a new chain of AORTA devices.

In terms of actual numbers, the mobile industry exceeded 1 Trillion USD in revenues for the first time with services revenue making up 80% of the mix and 20% being contributed by infrastructure, handsets, and misc. Several operators are now exceeding $2B/quarter in data revenues.

Several subscription milestones throughout the year: 50% penetration, almost 4B worldwide, 600M China, 300M India. India and China both added more than 100M subs in 2008. As expected, 3G crossed the inflection point in the western markets (30%+ penetration) while in Korea and Japan, it was getting hard to find people without 3G (85%+ penetration). Mobile web penetration is above 25% and is becoming quite significant.

Thanks to the iPhone, we seem to have settled on sub-$200 smartphones with race to $150 and $100 on the cards. Flat-rate data subscriptions went above 10% in the western markets. Over 20% of the global service revenues are not dependent on data while non-SMS revenues surged past 40%. With the advent of Femto and UMA, we might see a new front in the battle for the digital home, esp. as bundling and quad-play offers become common place and convergence starts to take different shapes, forms, and business models. Carriers are starting to worry about mobile data usage and looking for alternate strategies and business models. Chinese OEMs started to become more dominant and started to win some major accounts. Don’t be surprised by a major acquisition by them in 09.

Among other events of significance: Mobile TV continued to suffer from highpricendititis, Helio shut down, China and India delayed 3G, WM got updated as MS got behind, Yahoo cemented some impressive operator deals as GYM got more active in mobile, Microsoft entangled Yahoo in a mating dance, Mobile Open got into the industry physce, 700 MHz auction drama ensued, Beijing Olympics rocked, SMS handed the presidency to Obama, Whitespaces and FCC tangled, LTE dominated, UMB died, Admob exponentiated, M&A slowed, IP scuffles continued, over 1.2B new devices shipped, Nokia sold more than 100M devices in each quarter, Samsung surged, Motorola pondered, AT&T iJoyed, Vodafone said Namaste India, US edged past Japan in mobile data revenues, DoCoMo continued to dominate the mobile data revenues rankings, India edged past US in total mobile subscribers, Mobile Facebook spread, Twitter tweeped, Symbian went open source, Sequoia panicked, INQ launched, Economy tanked, WalMart started selling iPhone, Palm got a lifeline, Change was in the air.

We covered these is much detail in our regular industry research notes, books, whitepapers, blog posts, speeches, panels, and more. Look forward to continuing the conversation this year.

2009 will also be a pretty eventful year from several perspectives: business models, user experience and expectations, ecosystem posturing, disruption, and friction. How are things going to shape up? What will be hot and what will fade into oblivion? How will competition shape up the new sub-segments?

We put some of the questions to our colleagues in the industry. We were able to glean some valuable insights from their choices and comments. This survey is different from some of the others in the sense that industry movers and shakers participate. Executives and insiders (n=200) from leading mobile companies across the value chain and around the world opined to help us see what 2009 might bring.

Six names were randomly drawn for one of our three books released in 2008 (Mobile Advertising, Enterprise Mobility and Wireless Broadband)

The winners are:

Akio Orii, CFO and VP, Toyota
Declan Carew, New Product Strategy Manager, Vodafone
Helen Keegan, Consultant, Beep Marketing
Rich Begert, CEO, Singlepoint, and
Russ McGuire, VP, Sprint Nextel
Jonathan Ebinger, General Partner, Blue Run Ventures

Congrats and Thank You.

Now onto the survey results. The makeup of the respondents below:

Will we see a pull-back in mobile data spending globally/in the US?

The wireless data industry has been somewhat unharmed so far (though OEMs and Infrastructure providers are bearing the brunt of the economic storm). Flat rate pricing, smartphones, 3G networks, better UX are all helping in the continued surge of mobile data consumption and hence revenues. Most expect that though we might see some scaling back in mobile data spending, overall, the growth will continue. The global markets will be slightly better off than the US.

Will Android handset sales exceed iPhone’s in 2009?

The overwhelming majority thought that iPhone will continue to dominate Android in 2009 though 2010 could be a different story. Android has had a good start and if the number of handsets keep on increasing with more carriers carrying it in more countries, Android might not exceed but can come awfully close.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who will be the most open of them all?

“OPEN” was the biggest buzzword of 2008 though it means different things to different people. Almost everyone thinks, Google is likely to set the agenda on “open” for others to follow.

Will Apple launch new iPhone models in 2009?

The answer is yes but will they be just minor upgrades or shake-the-market new models. With Android, Nokia, and RIM breathing down its neck, Apple will need more than just upgrades to maintain the limelight.

Will Mobile Advertising see a rise in ad-spend in 2009?

There might be some slow down but mobile advertising ad-spend will keep on increasing. Targeting capability is increasing and CPMs are coming down making for a more efficient mobile channel for advertising. In our own work, we have seen brands fall into two camps: one who are scaling down on inefficient channels like print and radio and moving money into digital including mobile and the others who don’t have quite the appetite for mobile and want to keep investing in channels that they are most familiar with.

Will India and China launch nationwide 3G in 2009?

After many years of delay, the two powerhouses set to launch 3G in 2009. China with TD-SCDMA/WCDMA and India with WCDMA are set to doll out some of the largest contracts seen in the industry.

Will Mobile Payments get any traction in North America and Western Europe?

The plans for mobile payments launch will get pulled back a bit due to the economic crisis. Limited rollouts and trials to continue. Some progress will be made in international mobile remittances.

Will Microsoft launch its own mobile phone?

Will they, Won’t they? How can they not? The probability increased from last year for an Mphone coming to a store near you. But, with the boeingification of Microsoft, it is hard to get any decisions to the market quickly.

Will Clearwire meet the 1.3 million subscriber target in 2009?

The economic climate might force slow-down of expansion and thus the optimistic subscriber forecasts could be impacted.

Will Mobile Open Source mitigate fragmentation?

Not a clear cut answer. Depends on how other versions of Android phones do in the market and if the application development remains a challenge across the Android and Symbian family of devices.

Will cable companies make a major play in wireless in 2009?

Quad-Play is the name of the game. Cable companies have invested half-heartedly thus far. 2009 might be the year they move in aggressively.

Will Microsoft buy RIM?

RIM has become too big and powerful to be consumed by Microsoft easily but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Will Obama’s administration have a major impact on network neutrality and open networks debate?

Not a priority for now. No high expectations, just regular bureaucratic grind.

Will carriers start launching Apple/Android style appstores?

Opinions remain divided. I think most are tempted to build but will outsource the development.

Will Microsoft make windows mobile free to OEMs?

Android (and to some extent Symbian) has pushed Microsoft in a corner. Will it preempt the demise of its pricing strategy? Reduction in price might be the safest bet at this time.

Will the smartphone penetration hit the inflection point in the western markets?

We are getting to that inflection point. 2009 seems to be the year with major implications for the ecosystem.

Will UMA/Femtocells cement their place in the mobile ecosystem?

As 3G networks get burdened by data usage, carriers will look to making UMA and Femtocells as a critical piece of their network strategy

Will consumer privacy and data security rise to be one of the important issues of 2009?

Privacy? What Privacy? Another celebrity mishap might pull this issue to the front burner.

Despite conventional wisdom, what will not happen in 2009?

There were many. Sampling - Microsoft will not buy Yahoo. US Cellular will not be sold. Global economy will not recover in 2009. LTE won’t be commercially deployed. India and China will struggle to get substantial progress with 3G. Motorola will not breakup. Nortel will not disappear. 2009 won’t be the year of mobile advertising.

It is hard to cover the mobile industry in 20 questions. As pointed out by our panelists, there are a number of other issues and opportunities that will help shape our ecosystem - monetization of social networks, the fight for mobile advertising dollars, continued impact of globalization, security and privacy, NFC, IMS, VoIP, enterprise apps beyond email, battery improvements, new interaction modalities, health risks of RF radiation, OpenSocial, GF/FB Connect, Comes with Music, Mobile Widgets, Mobile 3.0, LTE, MIDs, Off-portal, Embedded Mobile, M2M, and others.

However, be rest assured, we will be tracking these and much more throughout the year and sharing them through various channels.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. We will be calling on you again next year. We are clearly living in “interesting times” with never a dull moment in our dynamic industry. It has been a terrific year for us here at Chetan Sharma Consulting and we are looking forward to 2009 and seeing many of you along the way.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

Recap of "Tomorrow’s Wireless Future" November 20, 2008

Posted by chetan in : 3G, 4G, AORTA, Carriers, Enterprise Mobility, European Wireless Market, Indian Wireless Market, International Trade, Japan Wireless Market, Location Based Services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Smart Phones, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, WiMax, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 5 comments

Tomorrow’s Wireless Future

One of the reasons I love what I do is that I get a chance to work with really smart people around the world on some cutting-edge projects. Additionally, I get the opportunity to interview some of the brightest minds in the industry. This year has been particularly rewarding. I probably did close to 25 events which were a mix of keynote addresses, panel moderation, panel participation, university lectures, and other speeches. Add in the 20+ client project visits and it all translates into more than a trip every other week to the SeaTac airport. My suitcase has been permanently positioned at the doorstep in my house.

Earlier this week, I had the distinct honor of moderating a panel of some of the most eminent senior wireless research scientists and CEOs of wireless companies from Finland where we explored the future of the wireless landscape from user interface to reduction in carbon footprint to privacy and security issues and much more.

Also, had the privilege to do a Q&A session with Dr. Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel Corporation after his keynote address. This note summarizes the topics discussed during the “Tomorrow’s Wireless World” event.

Many people might not be aware but the City of Oulu in the central part of Finland is a leading epicenter of wireless activities with many major industry players setting up shops for doing R&D work. In fact, it is quite likely that one of the companies out of Oulu has had an impact in some way on the mobile phone you have in your pocket (and we are not including Nokia).

The topic of our panel was “Your Wireless Future” – a broad topic that is always difficult to cover in 60 minutes or less. My illustrious panel included (from R to L):

· Prof. Juha Röning, Head of the Dept. Electrical and Information Engineering, Oulu University. A leading edge research center, many companies in Oulu have been spun out of this department

· Markus Asplund, VP, Sesca Technologies. A major services firm in the mobile industry

· Ari Pouttu, Director of Center of Wireless Communications, University of Oulu. A leading research center in doing work in access technologies.

· David Chartier, CEO, Codenomicon. A major player in the network security space. Their tools are used for hardening their products by companies such as Cisco, Apple, IBM, Nokia, and others.

· Craig O’Connell, Sr. Manager, Elektrobit. Working with pretty much all OEMs around the world

· Dr. Jussi Paakkari, VP, R&D ICT, VTT. Doing some cutting edge research in the area of network protocols, security, access, machine vision systems, and much more

· Purnima Kochikar, Director, Software and Services. Nokia. Well, you know Nokia

I started by asking the panelists about what in their view have been some of the defining trends over the last 12 months. Summary of answers – iPhone; android; move towards full mobile browser; browser will reduce fragmentation and more innovation will happen on this front; with the rise of smartphones, security and privacy have become an issue,

Some other salient points (read issues and opportunities) from the discussion:

· It is forecasted (by WWWRF) that in another 10 years, we will have 1000 radios per every subscriber. That would translate into few trillion nodes around us. The level of complexity and carbon footprint will be enormous. One has to figure out a way to address both.

· City of Oulu has first of a kind experiment with NFC where the technology has been embedded in day-to-day life from home, school, train station, restaurant, probably every object in the city. Pretty interesting experiment that will lead to interesting use cases and technology implementations.

· There are so many protocols being integrated into the device that hackers are targeting not only the data but the protocol weaknesses to gain access. IT finally starting to address smartphone issue in their networks.

· The role of Cognitive radio and SDRs will gain prominence as more access technologies get introduced.

· In a ubiquitous environment with finite spectrum, “sensing” technologies will have a great role in optimization. Sense and do the best for the consumer, the device, and the network. Hyper connectivity will become the norm.

· In addition to touch, gesture and face recognition will add to a better multimodal experience.

· Mobile payments is coming and going to make a big impact. We have to of course sort out the business models.

· 3Cs of mobile – convergence, context, and community (Nokia’s Mantra).

· The very business of R&D has changed significantly with corporations choosing to outsource R&D and the cycle of concept to market launch has shrunk from 6 years or more to 12-18 months.

· More innovation will come from integration of existing technologies rather than some big breakthrough.

· Demand for bandwidth will keep growing.

· Significant opportunities in medicine, enterprise, and other industry verticals.

· In developing countries, while consumers are willing to pay for expensive devices, they don’t have any appetite for expensive service plans.

Some discussion points from Craig’s speech and our Q&A session:

· World will go to free MIPS and free baud (computing and communications). What happens then?

· Moore’s law is good for another 15 years based on 5 generation of future chipsets that they have in the labs. And it will probably keep going after that.

· Awareness of context really important.

· Many types of devices will proliferate including MIDs, education devices, some designed specifically for special purpose (medical monitors) and geographies (emerging markets).

· Global challenges are education, health, computing, and communication.

· In the developed world, wireless technology can help reduce the cost which is increasing at the rate of $200B/year and in the developing world, technology can help provide access to health care.

· Convenience and access trumps security concerns.

· Areas of opportunities – Telemedicine, education, economic development, governance, energy and environment.

· This is Craig’s 11^th recession. Principle to tackle has been the same every time. You cannot save your way out of recession. You can only innovate out of a recession. Intel R&D budgets will remain the same.

· Innovation is key to surviving and competing in the global economy, now more so than ever.

· The fact that so much can be done in these tiny piece of electronics is just amazing and the drive to do better and more using technology keeps him going, keeps him inspired.

Craig is passionate about education and innovation and he serves on more global committees than he would care to admit. His work outside of Intel has been equally impactful.

It should be noted that the Matti Pennanen, Mayor of Oulu who also graced the event with his presence is a technologist at heart and understands the role of innovation in the growth and strengthening of their economy. How many tech-savvy Mayors do we have in other countries? I thought so. I have noticed similar trends in Korea, Ireland, and Israel. They all have something in common – great early education system and maniacal focus on innovation and desire to succeed. It was great chatting with Mayor Matti about technology trends and opportunities. In this global economy, politicians better become tech-savvy really fast or they won’t be serving their constituents well. Cities, states, and countries need to start thinking like startups and compete for every dollar.

My thanks to my friends Victor Vurpillat and Brenda Fox at Global Connexus and Pauliina Pikkujämsä at Oulu Innovation for inviting me to participate in the discussion.

Image Courtesy: Global Connexus

« newer posts older posts »

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Event Recap: PNWS (Vancouver) and Location Based Advertising (PARC) January 30, 2009

Mobile Industry Predictions 2009 January 1, 2009

Recap of "Tomorrow’s Wireless Future" November 20, 2008

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New Whitepaper: The Untapped Mobile Data Opportunity December 16, 2009

Roundup of second Mobile Breakfast Series event – Mobile Broadband December 6, 2009

US Mobile Data Market Update Q3 2009 November 9, 2009

CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Roundup 2009 October 12, 2009

Roundup of the first Mobile Breakfast Series event September 29, 2009

US Wireless Data Market Update - Q2 2009 August 8, 2009

New WhitePaper: Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era July 14, 2009

Introducing "Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era" July 10, 2009

Future in Review (FiRe) 2009 roundup May 31, 2009

TiECON Conference Roundup

US Wireless Data Market Update - Q1 2009 May 11, 2009

Global Wireless Data Market Update - 2008 April 28, 2009

Behind the Millennial Advertising Numbers April 17, 2009

Carnival of Mobilists #169 April 12, 2009

CTIA 2009 Roundup April 6, 2009

US Wireless Data Market Update Q408 and 2008 March 2, 2009

Is Kindle the new iPhone? February 10, 2009

Event Recap: PNWS (Vancouver) and Location Based Advertising (PARC) January 30, 2009

Mobile Industry Predictions 2009 January 1, 2009

Recap of "Tomorrow’s Wireless Future" November 20, 2008

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