Chetan Sharma Consulting has an End of Year 2007 Global Wireless Data Market survey.
They say the global service revenues for 2007 were $700 billion, with the data service revenues more than $120 billion. China signed its 500 millionth subscription, and both India (in Feb 08) and the US crossed the 250 million subscription mark.
Mobile data contributed approx 17% of the revenue.
Other interesting findings from their research:
- The worldwide markets reached 3.3B subscriptions by Q407 up 20% from 2006 levels. Significant growth is coming from India and China with both countries registering close to 8-9M net adds per month. Overall, the world market is at almost 50% penetration.
- US surpassed Japan as the most valuable mobile data market in service revenue with US adding $24.5B vs. $23.2B for Japan in 2007 mobile data service revenues. China with $12.5B was ranked number 3.
- NTT DoCoMo continues to dominate the wireless data service revenues rankings with over $12.13B in service data revenues for 2007 however Q/Q growth has dropped to single digits. DoCoMo crossed 80% in 3G penetration and is expected to touch 90% by end of the year.
- DoCoMo was followed by China Mobile, KDDI, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, O2 UK, SK Telecom, Softbank, and China Unicom to round up the top 10 operators by wireless data service revenues.
- All the top 10 carriers exceeded $3B in data revenues for the year.
- In terms of absolute dollar amount, 3 UK leads the pack with $29 data ARPU (qualifying limit: 4 million subs). By comparison, the rest of the top 4 operators are below $22. In fact, 3 UK reported the highest ARPU recorded for the year at approximately $94 (in Q2). Other operators who reported overall ARPU above $60 were KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Rogers, and 3 Sweden.
- The biggest jump in data revenues was experienced by Verizon Wireless with over 68% increase from 2006 followed by AT&T with 63% jump and O2 UK making 49% gain.
- The top 10 operators increased their revenue by 32% during 2007 (from 2006) to reach almost $62 billion in data service revenues, thus accounting for almost half of the global data service revenues though they account for only 27% of the global subscription base.
- China Mobile with 369M (as of Dec 07, the numbers increased to 384M by Feb 08) remains the #1 carrier in terms of total number of subscribers followed by Vodafone at 252M and China Unicom with 160M subscriptions.
- Telefonica, América Móvil, SingTel, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), and Orange (France Telecom) are the next five largest telecom groups in the world.
- In terms of individual carriers in a given country, AT&T and Verizon Wireless occupy the #3 and #4 spot respectively ahead of NTT DoCoMo, which is at #5.
- As far as 3G is concerned, GSA reported 293 WCDMA commercial launches worldwide with over 270M 3G users (66% of them are WCDMA users vs. EV-DO). Both Japan and Korea continue to expand their 3G base with both reporting over 75-80% penetration.
- Deployment of 3.5G technologies such as HSDPA and EV-DO Rev A (and B) are also gaining momentum. Networks are getting deployed and market is being seeded with some of the early handsets.
- In terms of 4G, there is a strong momentum behind LTE, UMB is practically dead, and proponents of WiMAX are pushing the technology as a 4G candidate, though it is starting to lose its time advantage.
[Via Gigaom]
