Africa is embracing mobile enthusiastically, with four percent growth in subscribers between the first and second quarters of 2010. “Africa’s low mobile penetration and usage are now attracting multinational mobile operators such as Bharti and Vodafone to the world’s last remaining growth market,” remarked ABI Research VP of forecasting, Jake Saunders. “This new competition will lead to lower monthly tariffs and will allow more people on the continent to access a mobile phone.”
An exploding area of interest in Africa’s mobile arena is mobile financial services. Pyramid Research predicts that the total value of mobile money transfers in Africa will exceed $200 billion in 2015, almost eight percent of Africa’s nominal GDP due to users’ growing trust in the system and a wider range of services.
“In many developing regions, including Africa, the availability of formal financial services is limited to certain geographic and income ranges, often leaving the majority of the population to rely on unreliable and costly informal channels,” said Jan ten Sythoff, analyst at large, Pyramid Research. “Key market players, banks and mobile operators in particular are keen to address this opportunity. By 2015, Pyramid forecasts that more than one in five people in Africa will be registered to use mobile money services.”
In developed markets, where mobile penetration levels are greater than 100 percent, mobile subscription growth is being spurred by better connectivity. The introduction of high-speed 4G data technologies such as WiMAX and LTE will ensure that subscription growth remains robust even in these hyper-saturated markets. ABI Research expects mobile subscriptions to reach 6.4 billion by 2015, of which 169 million will be subscribed to 4G technologies.
As mobile adoption grows, so does the revenue from mobile voice and data. According to Gartner, worldwide mobile voice and data revenue will exceed one trillion dollars a year by 2014. Mobile will generate revenue from a wide range of additional services such as context, advertising, applications and service sales. Each of these will be a significant business worth several tens of billions of dollars per year.
“We see three major eras of mobility,” said Nick Jones, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The device era was characterized by iconic devices such as the Motorola RAZR and was dominated by device manufacturers. This was followed by the application era which arrived with the iPhone, popularizing application and media stores. Going forward, the service and social era will build on the application era, but it will be characterized by cloud services and streaming media. Applications will survive, but often as a component of a more complex end-to-end experience involving the cloud.”
In mature markets, Gartner believes that smartphones will dominate device sales for the foreseeable future. However, the dominant mobile device type shipped globally will be feature phones without an identifiable OS because emerging markets dominate handset demand. Many new device types such as tablets and e-book readers will emerge through 2012 and some will find a role in corporations. However, none will achieve a market share comparable to smartphones or laptops, which will remain the dominant corporate mobile devices. Mobile knowledge workers will require both a PC and a smartphone through 2014.
The smartphone platform space is very competitive, and the leaders will change through 2014 with Symbian losing share to Android and iPhone OS (iOS). Android is gaining ground fast and will appear on consumer electronics and non-handset devices such as tablets. However, Gartner asserts that increasingly, context, more than platform will define mobile business for the next decade. Mobile technologist C. Enrique Ortiz defines mobile context “as the set of and the intersection between the facts, events, circumstances and information that surrounds the mobile user at a given point in time.”
“In 2010, we are seeing the beginning of simple context using location to suggest interests and to guide searching,” Jones explained. “Context will be a major commercial battleground with powerful vendors such as Nokia, Google and Apple striving to own the consumer’s context. Context will also be bound up with social relationships and social networks, illustrated today by services such as location-tagged posts to Facebook and Twitter.”
Due to the growing importance of context, Gartner is currently advising businesses to develop their mobile strategy based on technology-independent management goals and styles, rather than detailed device, platform or application policies. Traditional mobile strategies were designed to support well-defined requirements with devices, applications and services provided and managed by IT professionals. Requirements of this type will persist, but it will not form the majority of corporate mobility by 2015 because of changes in user requirements, technology and the nature of work itself.
