The economic recession may have caused layoffs and cutting back in the enterprise, but it hasn’t hurt the growth of business use of mobile data services. According to ABI Research, mobile data services revenues will increase 17% next year and continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% until 2014.
The uptick in enterprise mobile data use isn’t occurring in spite of the economy; it is actually occurring because of it, according to practice director Dan Shey. He said that company consolidations have forced the remaining workforce to become more efficient and “mobile data services offer the most options for tailoring services to the needs and work practices of workers in order to increase productivity and business efficiency.”
For example, more business customers are using SMS messaging for communications, making messaging services the largest driver of data revenues on a global basis. Worldwide, messaging revenues stemming from the enterprise will grow 10% through 2014, totaling $48 billion. For North America in particular, mobile broadband revenues are outpacing other services to be the highest revenue drivers from 2010 to 2014. Eastern Europe and the Middle East, however, will continue to capture the greatest share of mobile broadband services revenues with revenues growing to 27% and 26%, respectively, by 2014. Amongst Asia Pacific mobile business customers, ABI found that application download revenues will see the greatest growth with customers in Asia Pacific and Western Europe accounting for the highest portion of ARPU spend on apps.