MMS growth to stay especially strong; SMS growth lower

As revenue growth from mobile voice services has fallen, carriers have looked to mobile data services to keep the money flowing. Mobile messaging has been one of the top mobile data services, and revenues from all types of messages sent on handsets have been rising.

The number of people in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain sending SMS messages (aka short message service—think texts) across the EU is growing 3.3% annually, according to December 2008 data from Airwide Solutions. Airwide said that only users of MMS (multimedia messaging service—think pictures) were growing faster, at 9.2%.

UK mobile users alone sent 25 million text messages every day in 2008. Texting by mobile users with incomes of £30,000 ($55,200) and above is growing especially quickly, at 16.9% per year.

“Whilst an increase in mobile messaging traffic is certainly good news for the industry, it also underlines the need to ensure that an operator’s underlying infrastructure is efficient and equipped to support the increase in traffic volumes over the years ahead,” said Jay Seaton, CMO at Airwide, in a statement.

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In addition to having the largest growth in MMS users at 15.2%, France saw the second-biggest increase in SMS users, at 8.1% in 2008.

Airwide said continued growth would come in part from mobile marketing and advertising, and that 2009 would see the introduction of location-based mobile advertising. The company predicted mobile messaging would grow even more quickly in less economically developed and newly industrialized regions such as Asia-Pacific and Africa.

Although mobile messaging as a whole is predicted to keep growing, text messaging—the most mature mobile messaging technology—may not drive that growth.

Frost & Sullivan predicted in September 2008 that while MMS revenues in Western Europe would enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than one-third from 2007 to 2011, revenues from SMS would actually dip slightly during that period.

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