Malaysian mobile broadband market to be worth US$3 billion by 2015
A new research report has revealed that the Malaysian mobile broadband and data market was worth about US$2 billion in 2010 and is expected to reach US$3 billion by 2015.
According to researchers, the mobile subscriber market is heading towards saturation and all market players are looking at mobile broadband as a growth driver. While Malaysia’s mobile market is saturated with a subscriber penetration rate of 117% in 2010, mobile broadband and 3G services still represent significant opportunities with wireless broadband having the potential to achieve up to 5.6 million subscribers by 2015.
Wireless broadband has been fast gaining popularity over fixed broadband with almost 2 million wireless broadband subscribers compared to 1.65 million fixed broadband subscribers in 2010. In 2009, fixed broadband dominated over wireless broadband with 1.4 million subscribers to 0.9 million subscribers.
Still, fixed broadband will gain market share in 2011 and 2012 due to the introduction of high-speed broadband and wholesale deals by Maxis and Celcom. Governmental support for high-speed broadband will also help drive the fixed broadband market. The Malaysian fixed broadband market is expected to reach 2.2 million subscribers in 2015.
The increasing use of smartphones, driven by rapid price decline and application richness, has increased demand for mobile broadband. Smartphones access the internet via a 3G connection, allowing users to be connected on the go without the need for dongles.
According to researchers, with the Internet user base to reach 23-25 million by 2015, it is expected that 70% of them would have access to a personal internet connection. The smartphone strategy will be the big bet of all mobile operators going forward especially when almost 13 million broadband users are expected to access the internet via smartphones by 2015.
Other areas of interest include the enterprise services market which consists of data center services, M2M services, IT/System Integration services, and WAN services. The enterprise services market earned revenues of RM2.7 billion in 2010 and is expected to reach RM5.8 billion in 2015, making it the fastest growing ICT market in Malaysia.
The Malaysian Data Center Services market is set to grow at 16 percent CAGR with Cloud Computing to be an important driver of growth as Malaysian enterprises demonstrates increasing interest in Cloud services.
SaaS, the dominant segment of the Cloud market, is set to witness strong growth powered by CRM, Collaboration and HRM applications in the Malaysian market.
Researchers add that enterprises in Malaysia have recently begun embracing the SaaS delivery model. Their interest is primarily driven by the lower total cost of ownership in the services model, the conversion of CapEx to predictable OpEx and the ability to scale up or down depending on business needs.
Motivated by the growing interest, an increasing number of global participants are showing high level of activity in the country, which is helping improve awareness levels across enterprises.
However, enterprises continue to remain skeptical of Cloud adoption due to Security and Privacy concerns. This, along with the low reliability of broadband internet in the country, may hamper BAaaS adoption in the short-term. The government’s efforts towards building a knowledge economy and improving broadband infrastructure may alleviate these challenges in the long run.
US Mobile Market consolidation not necessary- Deutsche Telekom CFO
Deutsche Telekom CFO, Timotheus Hoettges told Bloomberg News that he sees no need for further consolidation of the U.S. mobile-phone market.
He mentioned that there are four national players in the U.S. market for 300 million households, whereas in Europe, there are 350 million households with close to 70 operators.
Deutsche Telekom’s current focus in the U.S. is on expanding its 3G network. It is investing $3.5 billion euros in the network in 2009. He said that the mobile data market in the US is booming and they must participate in that now.
On the Issue of 4G networks, there is a possibility that T-mobile could provide funding in exchange for access to ClearWire’s 4G network. Verizon and AT&T are already buliding independent 4G networks.
Premium content drives Asia’s mobile
As the growth number of cellular subscribers starts to flatten across the Asia-Pacific region, the mobile communications industry will in future be driven largely by data services, an analyst says.
Frost & Sullivan said in a statement Tuesday that while messaging continues to contribute the bulk of revenues in emerging mobile data markets, much of the growth potential lies in premium content.
In the Asia-Pacific region, messaging accounted for about 39.6 percent of total data revenues last year, excluding revenues shared with third-party content providers. Overall, the mobile data market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17.9 percent between 2005 and 2011, the analyst said.
Janice Chong, industry manager at Frost & Sullivan, noted: “Subscribers in most Asia-Pacific countries have strong preference for local content, which creates the impetus for the fast-growing mobile content market.”
The demand for premium content will also be boosted by an expanding regional subscriber base and better 3G (Third Generation) network coverage, according to Frost & Sullivan. Cheaper advanced multimedia handsets, and the race by mobile providers to secure a continuous stream of content through partnerships will also drive growth of mobile data revenues, the analyst added.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the Asia-Pacific premium content market–spanning 13 countries in the region–raked in revenues worth US$9.4 billion last year. This market is expected to reach US$32.9 billion by the end of 2011.
The research company also noted that in some Asia-Pacific markets, the revenue share ratio skewed in favor of mobile operators, rather than content providers which are also required to pay hefty royalties for applications to music label companies and associations. This has held back the growth of the premium content industry in some countries.
Chong explained: “In markets such as Indonesia and the Philippines, mobile operators typically retain 60 to 70 percent of the revenue from sale of content, while content providers receive the remaining smaller portion.”
She added that content providers in these countries believe they deserve a larger revenue share because they bear the entire cost of content development.
This trend is particularly inherent in markets outside Japan and South Korea, Chong said, mostly due to the popularity of SMS (short messaging service) based applications that contribute to low data traffic usage. As such, operators will tend to seek a higher revenue share from content downloads to compensate for the low data traffic revenue, the analyst said.
Source- http://www.zdnetasia.com
