The mobile messaging market will generate over $14.5 billion (â‚Ź12.7 billion) in western Europe by the end of 2007, according to a new report from IDC.
The group says that the success of short message services (SMS) will now be built upon with the new generation of multimedia messaging services (MMS) and mobile instant messaging (MIM).
Whilst multimedia services have now finally arrived for virtually all European mobile operators, IDC believes that SMS still has a lot of life in it and MMS is not expected to cannabilise SMS revenues just yet, as new SMS channels continue to drive revenue.
Analysts at Ovum disagree with this assessment and have advised operators to carefully price their MMS services or risk undercutting their valuable SMS revenues. They warn of a potential ‘nightmare’ situation of more messages, but fewer dollars (see Mobile Operators Could Cannabilise Their Own Revenues, Warns Ovum).
Instant messaging via mobile phones is still to get out of the starting blocks, partly because it will run through the faster GPRS system, but many users still do not have GPRS-enabled phones or subscriptions.
“Some European mobile operators have invested large amounts of money in MIM but now appear to be easing up and starting to take a back seat role to see what developments take place in the near future,” says IDC.
