Summary
The US mobile data market grew by 3% QoQ and 14% YoY. The overall services revenue declined again by 1%. The device revenue increased by 21% which helped the overall revenue to grow by 3%.
The biggest news of the quarter was as we had suggested last year – T-Mobile finally going past Sprint to become #3 for the first time. TMO continues to add the bulk of postpaid phone subs and it helped the company reverse the declining postpaid ARPU trend that had been so prevalent for the last three years. AT&T’s postpaid ARPU also stabilized
All four operators delivered historic low churn rates and are running much tighter operations. Net income improved 11% YoY.
After seeing steep declines in 2014, the mobile data pricing has started to inch up in 1H 2015. The emphasis of unlimited is paving way for shared data plans and the data buckets per account keep on inching up. In fact, many low-to-mid tiers have seen a price increase. Some of the upper enterprise tiers have seen the prices double. This bodes well for the margins and revenue in 2H 2015.
Smartphone penetration increased to 78% and roughly 95% of the devices sold now are smartphones. The smartphone penetration amongst postpaid users is now 84%.
The iPhone again dominated with 75% of the smartphone profits. While the Android profits improved 41% QoQ, the smartphone business remains a challenge for a number of Android OEMs.
As we have suggested for the last couple of years, Microsoft finally got rid of Nokia and is focusing its energy on software and services.
4th wave services continue to grow at a very past face around the globe. IoT as a category is also making steady progress with a number of players reporting multi-million dollar revenue quarters most notably Intel with over a billion dollars in revenue in the first six months. Fitbit reported $736M in 1H with a whopping 49% margin.
Your feedback is always welcome.
Chetan Sharma
We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds, future research reports, articles, and our annual thought-leadership summit – Mobile Future Forward. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Nov 2015.
Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this update are our clients.
We will be discussing a number of critical industry themes and future impacting topics at our annual summit Mobile Future Forward with some incredible thought-leaders from around the globe. Speakers, Sponsors, and the executives at Mobile Future Forward invite you to participate in the discussion on Sept 29th in Seattle. Join Glenn Lurie, President & CEO, AT&T Mobility, Dr. Eric Topol, Chief Academic Officer, Scripps Health, Rima Qureshi, Chief Strategy Officer, Ericsson, Hank Skorny, SVP – IoT, Neustar, Raja Rajamannar, CMO, Mastercard, Sanjiv Ahuja, Chairman, Tillman Global Holdings, Hossein Moiin, EVP and CTO, Nokia Networks, Craig Moffett, Partner, MoffettNathanson, Josh Will, SVP – Mobile, Best Buy, Tim Chang, Managing Partner, Mayfield, Prof. Shyam Gollakota, University of Washington, Mark Fernandes, Managing Director, Sierra Ventures, Erez Yarkoni, CIO and EVP, Telstra, Mark Showers, CIO and EVP, Reinsurance Group of America, Doug Suriano, SVP and GM, Oracle Communications, Vishal Gupta, Chief Products and IoT Officer, Silent Circle, Marty Cooper, Chairman, Dyna, Vijay Shekhar, Founder and CEO, Paytm, Julie Woods-Moss, CMO, CEO – Nextgen Business, Tata Communications, Andrew Hopkins, Managing Director – IoT, Accenture, Lo Toney, Partner – Catalyst Fund, Comcast Ventures, Robert Gelick, SVP and GM – Digital, CBSInteractive, Sujeet Chand, CTO and SVP, Rockwell Automation, Bob Azzi, Executive Managing Partner, Argylegriffin, Anand Chandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer, Snapdeal, Dr. Tony Yen, MD, CMIO, EvergreenHealth, and many more
