About this Report
Mobile communications markets have moved forward in such phenomenal leaps and bounds over the last two decades, it’s hard to remember how we ever lived before smartphones, constant messaging, email and the Internet. Remember when a fax was the coolest new thing? The world of technology, and particularly online services, has moved forward with amazing speed.
Here and now, in mid-2014, we’re living in a world with 6.8 billion active mobile subscriptions among a population of 7.25 billion human beings. We are going to pass the point, probably around the end of 2014, where we are living on a planet where there are more active mobile devices than living people. This is a remarkable achievement – in just a few decades, mobile telephony has reached a deeper level of penetration worldwide than TV, radio, the car, the flushing toilet and many other advances that have been around for many more years.
Clearly, everything is moving towards the mobile platform. We now have 6.85 billion mobile subscriptions versus only 1.16 billion fixed telephone lines. And between end-2011 and end-2014, the world gained 983 million more mobile subscriptions, but the world lost 47 million fixed-line subscriptions. So clearly, we can see a world where fixed-line technology is becoming, not obsolete yet, but certainly less popular, and everything is shifting to mobile.
Mobile messaging - the biggest non-voice sector in the industry
Within mobile communications, messaging is massive, it's a quarter-trillion dollar business and still growing. The messaging industry generated USD 220 bn in 2012, USD 240 bn in 2013, it's making USD 250 bn in 2014 and will peak out at USD 260 bn in 2016, talking in round numbers. There are a quarter of a trillion reasons to continue being excited about the mobile messaging business in 2014, 2015 and beyond.
As stated, mobile messaging is - right now in 2014 - bigger than ever. The worldwide mobile messaging business is now a quarter of a TRILLION dollar industry and 2014 is the first year the whole mobile messaging business will generate over USD 250 billion worldwide. This is up another USD 11 billion from last year. Mobile messaging is big business, and still growing.
SMS - alive and well and in use by more than 6 billion human beings
Despite the unfounded and naïve stories in the mobile press, SMS is far from dead, SMS still accounts for almost half of all the revenue generated by mobile messaging around the world. SMS will remain a USD 100 billion plus business for at least the next 3 years. Growing fast to match SMS for revenue generating potential, is OTT social chat messaging. By 2018, when the value of the global SMS business finally drops below USD 100 billion for the first time in almost a decade, so OTT messaging revenues will climb above USD 100 billion for the first time to become the new market leader.
Together, SMS and OTT are making a lot of money. USD 173 billion in 2014, combined, and rising to USD 195 billion in 2018. A decade ago in 2004, mobile industry executives were getting wildly excited over the fact that SMS was becoming a USD 30 billion dollar business. Now SMS and OTT services combined are making 200 billion bucks. Mobile messaging is a bigger and more exciting business than ever before, and there is more than a trillion dollars ahead to play for over just the next 4 years. With so much at stake in the mobile messaging business, it’s little wonder that the first half of 2014 has seen some major developments in the OTT space, most notably the acquisition of Viber by Rakuten, and Facebook’s big news acquisition of WhatsApp.
This is the consolidation we expected to see in OTT apps. WhatsApp and Viber acquired in the same week. We wrote in our the last edition of Mobile Messaging Futures 2013-2017, in July 2013:
“As the markets grow, it is entirely likely that major players such as WhatsApp, Viber and others, could very likely be acquired by big names such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple or Amazon, and then the messaging service can be integrated into the broader sphere of social networks and search advertising.”
There is no SMS versus OTT battle - everyone else has got it wrong
Since the last edition of Mobile Messaging Futures, a lot has happened in mobile messaging. The subject of ‘SMS versus OTT’ continues to be a hot topic in the media, yet we believe there is no “versus”; we believe that in fact there is very little real competition between SMS and OTT, there is only “SMS and OTT and social networking and MMS and much more” – consumers with smartphones now have a myriad of ways to share words, images and sounds, and they are using them all.
These social chat and sharing services have been exploding in growth in recent years. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Viber and many more, may appear to the end users as chat apps or online places to hang out with friends, or as apps for sharing images or short videos, but to retailers, these are all channels-to-market, these are direct routes to find, and communicate with, people who no longer wander shopping malls looking in the window for inspiration. These people now find their inspiration for new purchases online, among their social community.
As you surely know, the way companies [in tech] evolve now, is to build first, then monetize later. It’s all about building a great desirable service attracting millions of customers for free, then finding ways to monetize that customer base. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and a thousand more apps/services have been built this way.
OTT chat apps are not ‘SMS killers’, they are closer to social networks
Here at Portio Research, we have been saying for the last two or three years that OTT messaging apps are not the direct threat to SMS that many suggest, they are an all-new class of services, combining mobile messaging with social networking. These OTT chat apps are building communities, and then leveraging memberships to promote content discovery and generate revenues from content sales. It may be the sales of stickers and emoticons, it may be sales of premium games or game upgrades and in-game content. It may be promoting music sales, and it may be direct-to-consumer retail of fashion, home wares, electronics or more. But equally, these channels to market are now incorporating social communications, gaming and chat with more – access to financial services and full integration with retail e-commerce channels.
SMS remains what it has always been: a simple, cheap, easy, ubiquitous, discreet way to communicate a short message between almost any two mobile phones on the planet. In fact, as a tool for enterprises to communicate with their customers, A2P SMS is booming as 'the new email', with blisteringly high response rates.
OTT messaging apps are evolving into something closer to social networks, they present a new channel-to-market for content owners, advertisers and MNOs. MNOs need not fear these OTT players, they should embrace them, build partnerships, and exploit these channels to drive the rapid growth of non-voice services. Mobile data use is booming, and much of the growth is being driven by the exploding popularity of social networks, image sharing apps and OTT social chat apps. MNO's should embrace this growth, partner with OTT players and drive the growth faster and higher.
This report explores the relationships between SMS, OTT social chat apps, social networks, MNOs and consumers and presents to you a complete picture of this massive revenue-generating business and how it is growing going forward over the next 5 years.
More Reasons to Buy
Mobile Messaging Futures is the ONLY report available today that delivers to you such depth of quantitative and qualitative analysis of mobile messaging markets worldwide.
- The LEADING industry market-sizing data
- Thought leadership on SMS and OTT market development
- Detailed country-level forecasting
- Thorough industry-leading, world-class analysis of the dynamics between MNOs and consumers and how the different mobile messaging services are delivered and used
- Detailed analysis of messaging pricing mechanisms and the relationships between pricing and service uptake
You cannot find this depth of research and data anywhere else in the world. Mobile Messaging Futures has been the leading market report in this area for the last decade - companies throughout the industry trust Mobile Messaging Futures every year as their #1 source of market data.
Offering you the most insightful analysis of SMS and OTT available worldwide.
- Understand the forces driving the growth of OTT
- Examine the pressures on SMS in different country markets
- Analyse the interplay between SMS, OTT social chat apps, social networks and image/video sharing apps
- Understand consumer behaviour and how mobile tariffs can be used to influence which services consumers use
- Learn how to sustain SMS use while stimulating the growth of OTT in any market
This detailed, insightful and timely report packs out 322 pages for you, loaded with a staggering 296 Figures and 20 additional Tables supplying you with ALL the mobile messaging market sizing and forecast data you need for your segment analysis and business modelling requirements.
First published in 2005, this market leading report has now led the field for a decade, you will not find a deeper analysis of mobile messaging anywhere else on earth.
Delivered to you as a detailed 324-page PDF file, the report also comes complete with an Excel file containing all the key global and regional-level data sets, plus a further PDF file offering you a handy 32-slide Executive Summary.
Finally, as a buyer of Mobile Messaging Futures 2014-2018, you will also be entitled to receive all previous editions, if you want them, to provide additional background reading and to help you understand the historic changes and growth of the industry to get to where we are today.
