US Mobile Messaging Market – Growth and Opportunities
http://www.chetansharma.com/USMobileMessagingMarket.htm
Industry Study Sponsored by Sprint Nextel
Executive Summary
The US mobile data market has seen significant growth in terms of revenue growth and consumer adoption. In fact, the impressive data growth rate has made US the most valuable mobile data market in the world with almost $55 billion in data revenues in 2010 accounting for over 36% of the overall service revenues for the year.
A significant portion of the mobile data revenues comes from the most basic service of all – SMS (or TXT) Messaging. While the US was late in getting hooked on the texting craze that enamored most of the rest of the world, during the last few years, the consumers in the US have more than made up for the initial lag. The US is now the top texting nation in the world in terms of total volume as well in terms of per subscriber messages/day. This trend is much more pronounced in the younger demographics.
However, for the most part, texting has been a person-to-person (P2P) phenomenon with a smaller portion of the traffic being attributed to premium and business-to-consumer (B2C) SMS. With the decline of the ringtones and images business, the premium messaging growth has slowed down and migrated towards the standard B2C messaging which has grown over 50% in the last two years.
The business-to-consumer SMS has been taking off significantly as businesses find the SMS channel to be quite effective for communicating and engaging their customers and employees. There is significant pent-up demand for taking business-to-consumer SMS messaging to the next level by streamlining ecosystem pricing as well as access to the SMS infrastructure in a more user-friendly way.
This paper discusses the overall SMS ecosystem in the US market, the market size and the industry value chain. Further, it takes a look at the next phase of the ecosystem evolution with open APIs and flexible pricing models that will bring more businesses into the ecosystem and lead to higher revenue growth in the coming years.
Thanks.
Chetan Sharma
Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this paper are our clients.