As a region Europe has the highest adoption of mobile services at 121% penetration and this is expected to rise to 135% by 2012. At these high penetrations, although overall service revenue growth through the handset is expected to decline, ARPU is expected to grow among business users.
New market data from ABI Research forecasts overall business spend on mobile to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 4%, a significant statistic considering that ARPU from consumer mobile services will stay flat at a CAGR of 0.1%.
Not surprisingly, data services are providing the ARPU uplift driven by the uptake of smartphones, and adoption and usage of mobile email and internet services. The impact of these and other drivers is different for business customers in different occupational segments; the end result is a unique set of subscriber and ARPU growth rates, penetration, and total revenue opportunity by occupation.
In the current economic environment, focusing resources on the right business user segments is absolutely essential. Understanding the opportunities specific to each business sub segment will not only allow mobile suppliers to stay solvent in 2009, but position them for growth in better times.
The report, European Business Mobility Vertical Market Analysis, provides forecasts for five different areas - voice, messaging, information access services, computing applications and computing/information access applications.
Dan Shey, practice director, ABI Research Service