Mobile elite getting richer
The world’s top 10 mobile operators generated $202 billion in gross profit – up 4.2% year-on-year (YoY) – new research from market intelligence company, ABI Research shows.
Worldwide service revenue, year-on-year for 4Q-2012 grew 2.8% to US$ 240.5 billion.
However, ABI noted that Western Europe and Africa’s mobile operator demonstrated a contraction in service revenue YoY of 8.2% and 6.9%, respectively.
Middle East, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific are still showing reasonably robust rates of growth of 7% to 11%.
Eastern Europe and North America, however, are only barely keeping their service revenue growth in positive territory, ABI Research said.
“As the underlying lift from accumulating subscribers has matured, carriers are starting to cast around for additional revenue streams that don’t just boost revenues but also profitability,” said Jake Saunders, VP for core forecasting at ABI Research.
“There is still tremendous income to be generated from mobile services; the top 10 mobile carriers alone generated $202 billion in gross profit, up 4.2 % year-on-year in 2012,” Saunders said.
For some of those in the top 10, subscriber growth is still a major contribution (e.g. China Mobile, is 1st; MTN is 6th; and China Telecom, 8th).
These carriers may rely on expanding subscriber bases to drive overall profit for another 3 to 5 years, but after that, they will need to tap other sources, ABI Research warned.
MTN’s performance
MTN said in a quarterly update in April that it is connecting approximately 195 million people in 22 countries.
For the other carriers in the Top 10, securing a significant market share in their domestic/regional markets, combined with pooling infrastructure resources such as data centers, as well as group-level handset and equipment purchasing, has led to economies of scale.
MTN’s market share in South Africa is at 37.7%, or 24.950 million subscribers.
ABI Research said that Verizon Wireless (2nd), Vodafone Group (3rd), AT&T (4th), and NTT DoCoMo (5th) do hold significant market shares, but this does not entirely explain their success.
“These carriers have aggressively hopped onto the fourth innovation wave shaping the mobile telecommunications industry – namely, IP-based value-added services,” the research company said.
Over-The-Top (OTT) players can potentially sap the revenue opportunities for incumbent mobile telecom players but carriers, such as Verizon and AT&T, are showing that it is possible to put ARPU back on an upwards trajectory through the introduction of, for example, multi-device tariffs and M2M services, ABI Research said.
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