{"id":37105,"date":"2013-05-03T10:30:34","date_gmt":"2013-05-03T08:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=37105"},"modified":"2013-05-03T11:26:51","modified_gmt":"2013-05-03T09:26:51","slug":"mobile-elite-getting-richer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/37105\/mobile-elite-getting-richer\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobile elite getting richer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world’s top 10 mobile operators generated $202 billion in gross profit – up 4.2% year-on-year (YoY) – new research from\u00a0market intelligence company,\u00a0ABI Research<\/a> shows.<\/p>\n

Worldwide service revenue, year-on-year for 4Q-2012 grew 2.8% to US$ 240.5 billion.<\/p>\n

However, ABI noted that Western Europe and Africa\u2019s mobile operator demonstrated a contraction in service revenue YoY of 8.2% and 6.9%, respectively.<\/p>\n

Middle East, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific are still showing reasonably robust rates of growth of 7% to 11%.<\/p>\n

Eastern Europe and North America, however, are only barely keeping their service revenue growth in positive territory,\u00a0ABI Research said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the underlying lift from accumulating subscribers has matured, carriers are starting to cast around for additional revenue streams that don\u2019t just boost revenues but also profitability,\u201d said Jake Saunders<\/a>, VP for core forecasting at ABI Research.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere 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,\u201d Saunders said.<\/p>\n

For some of those in the top 10, subscriber growth is still a major contribution (e.g. China Mobile<\/a>, is 1st; MTN<\/a> is 6th; and China Telecom<\/a>, 8th).<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0ABI Research warned.<\/p>\n

MTN’s performance<\/h3>\n

MTN\u00a0said in a quarterly update in April that it is connecting approximately 195 million people in 22 countries.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

MTN’s market share in South Africa is at\u00a037.7%, or\u00a024.950 million subscribers.<\/p>\n

ABI Research said that\u00a0Verizon Wireless<\/a> (2nd), Vodafone Group<\/a> (3rd), AT&T<\/a> (4th), and NTT DoCoMo<\/a> (5th) do hold significant market shares, but this does not entirely explain their success.<\/p>\n

“These carriers have aggressively hopped onto the fourth innovation wave shaping the mobile telecommunications industry \u2013 namely, IP-based value-added services,” the research company said.<\/p>\n

Over-The-Top\u00a0(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,\u00a0ABI Research said.<\/p>\n

More on MTN and mobile carriers<\/h3>\n

MTN hits 195 million subscribers<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Telecoms boom leaves rural Africa behind<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Africa\u2019s mobile subscriber growth at 17.5%<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Biggest tech companies in the world<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The top 10 mobile operators in the world generated $202 billion in gross profit, up 4.2% year-on-year, new research shows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":8700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[5750,137,1562,26,28,207,5751],"class_list":["post-37105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobile","tag-abi-research","tag-att","tag-china-telecom","tag-headline","tag-mtn","tag-verizon-wireless","tag-vodafone-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37105"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37112,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37105\/revisions\/37112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}