Growth in wireless data spending by U.S. businesses will slow, moving down from an annual growth rate of 5.2 percent during 2009-2010 to 2.5 percent during 2013-2014, according to the latest market study by In-Stat.
Overall, In-Stat expects that U.S. businesses will spend close to $27 billion on wireless data in 2010.
"The strongest growth comes from the Administrative and Support Services, and the Education and the Professional Services verticals," says Frank Dickson, VP Research, Mobile Internet at In-Stat.
The mining vertical segment will have the steepest percentage decline, dropping from a 10 percent growth rate for 2009-2010 to a (-2 percent) contraction in 2013-2014.
I believe there's still a considerable upside opportunity in the U.S. market, but that growth will require significantly more creative -- enterprise user-centric -- market development activities.
The current marketing approach, to let the customers define the value prop and promote the service via word-of-mouth, clearly needs a boost from mobile carriers.
Additional data points from In-Stat's study include:
- Wireless handset spending by U.S. businesses will decline from $4.5 to $3.2 billion from 2010 to 2014 with the largest decline coming in the utility and manufacturing vertical segments at 10,000+ size of business.
- U.S. business spending on wireless voice will grow a modest $600 million from 2010 to 2014 with the 500-999 and 1,000-4,999 size-of-business markets showing only a slightly higher increase than the overall market.