Emerging markets offer operators best opportunity to gain foothold in growing mobile business customer market

NEW YORK, USA: While still a small portion of the total mobile market, business customers offer between 20 percent and 80 percent greater ARPUs than the average mobile consumer in emerging markets. As well, mobile business customer revenues will grow over the next five years from one to four percentage points more than the overall mobile services market.

But one of the most important statistics from analysis of the mobile business customer in emerging markets is that about 72 percent of all mobile business customers are self employed or work in businesses of fewer than 100 employees. This presents great opportunities for mobile operators.

ABI Research practice director Dan Shey comments: “Smaller businesses in emerging markets still have relatively simple computing and connectivity needs; but these will evolve and become more sophisticated as the regions’ economies grow. Operators in the emerging markets have the opportunity to become the primary solution providers of telecommunications and data services for a vast majority of companies in these regions.”

Other important highlights from the analysis:

* Data services for emerging market mobile business customers will command an even greater portion of revenues than those in developed region markets, growing to as high as 59 percent of total mobile services revenues by 2014.

* Mobile broadband services connecting computing devices such as laptops will, in most emerging market regions, provide more revenue than messaging services by 2014.