The market research firm Ovum has stated that global mobile phone industry revenues will not break the US$1,000 billion barrier until 2015, a year later than previously forecast.
The firm has revamped its prediction by a year due to the global economic crisis and maturity in the worldwide mobile market.
The outlook now, according to Ovum, is that mobile connections will grow to 7.4 billion in the next five years. Growth will be driven by emerging markets in the Asia Pacific region, notably China, India and Indonesia. Ovum said, combined, these markets will contribute 2.8 billion connections by 2015, or 38 per cent of the global total.
However, Ovum cautioned that even these high-growth regions will not be immune from maturity and that connection growth rates will decline rapidly in all markets towards the end of 2015.
"Every region has shown a marked slowdown in revenue growth between 2008 and 2009 and the result is that we now expect $1,000 billion revenues worldwide in 2015, compared with 2014 in our previous forecasts," said Ovum principal analyst Steven Hartley. Article