Although limited in size, the mobile corporate enterprise market is set to be a major source of revenue for the US telecoms industry in years to come. So says a new report from the mobile marketing and intelligence provider Telephia.
Corporate enterprise users are defined as subscribers who use mobile services at least 50% of the time for business purposes and whose monthly bill is paid for fully or in part by their employer. According to Telephia’s
Mobile Data Survey, they account for just 11% of the total US mobile market but what they lack in numbers, they assuredly make up for in influence.
Operators are particularly keen to target enterprise users as they are more inclined to use mobile data services than the average consumer. Some 36% of respondents admitted to using some type of mobile data application. Of these, 88% said they had used two-way messaging while 55% claimed to have sent and received emails. Almost half of enterprise data users (49%) had accessed the internet on their mobile phone, compared to just 32% of non-enterprise data users.
Enterprise data users spend more than twice as much time using data applications as the standard data subscriber and therefore represent a lucrative source of income for the industry. Telephia found that the average enterprise user accounts for 45% more in monthly revenue than the average of all users and is twice as likely to be a high spender (ie spend more than $60 per month).
Nonetheless, there remains a certain amount of resistance to mobile data applications, even among tech-savvy business users. When asked to highlight the major drawback to using data services, 34% of corporate enterprise data users highlighted the cumbersome process of typing in letters while inconveniences such as the difficulty of using a keypad (15%) and the small screen size (7%) were also mentioned.
“The corporate enterprise market is best poised to capitalize on data services that enable remote access to critical information sources from mobile devices,” said Mick Mullagh, president and chief executive of Telephia. “In order to further penetrate this critical market and profitably expand their businesses, device manufacturers and service operators need to simplify the processes around utilising high-productivity applications.”
| Usage Of High Productivity Mobile Data Applications Among Current US Data Users |
| |
|
|
| |
Enterprise Users |
Non-Enterprise Users |
| Two-way messaging |
88% |
78% |
| Email |
55% |
42% |
| Mobile Internet |
49% |
32% |
| Downloads |
41% |
45% |
| Internet Messaging |
29% |
27% |
| Source: Telephia Mobile Data Survey, Q4 2002 |
