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Global Mobile Messaging Upside at $334B in 2015

The mobile phone messaging services market is a significant growth opportunity. According to the latest market study by Portio Research, total worldwide mobile subscribers stood at nearly 5.3 billion at the end of 2010.

The upside potential is huge. The subscriber base is projected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 6.9 percent between 2010 and 2015, reaching nearly 7.4 billion by the end of 2015.

The worldwide mobile messaging market was worth $179.2 billion in 2010. This number is forecast to rise to $209.8 billion in 2011, and on to $334.7 billion by the end of 2015 -- at a CAGR of 13.3 percent between 2010 and 2015.

The Asia Pacific region generated the highest mobile messaging revenue in 2010 and Latin America produced the least.

Among the four mobile messaging services studied, SMS yielded the highest revenue for mobile service providers in 2010, followed by MMS, then mobile Email and finally mobile instant messaging (IM).

SMS made the highest contribution to worldwide mobile messaging revenue in 2010 with a 63.9 percent share, followed by MMS with 18.1 percent. Mobile e-mail revenue made up 14.2 percent, and the mobile IM was 3.8 percent.

SMS is still a consistent high-revenue generating service for network operators. In 2010, worldwide SMS revenue stood at a respectable $114.6 billion -- and is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 6.8 percent to reach $159 billion by end-2015.

However, it is expected that post-2011, the growth of worldwide SMS revenue will slow down due to the falling prices of SMS and the growing popularity of other data services such as mobile broadband, e-mail and IM.

With close to a 40 percent contribution to worldwide SMS revenue in 2010, the Asia Pacific region continued to generate the largest regional share of SMS revenue worldwide.

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