Global Mobile Data Revenue to Exceed $200 Billion in 2008

Worldwide mobile data service revenue, are set to achieve an industry first this year, when they are projected to exceed $200 billion, according to a report released Thursday by Informa Telecoms & Media’s Informa plc (INF)World Cellular Data Metrics edition.

The company said global mobile data revenues were $157 billion last year. Informa claimed revenues already hit the $49 billion mark in the first quarter of this year.

Informa said this means mobile operators now generate approximately one fifth of their revenue from data services. The company estimated non-SMS data contributed $17.48 billion of revenue in the first quarter, accounting for 35.6 percent of total data revenues.

"Growth drivers for the increase in data revenues include the acceleration in deployment of advanced technologies, an increasingly competitive market, and of course, growing consumer demand for mobile data services driven by popular data-optimized devices such as Apple's iPhone," said Informa Principal Analyst Nick Jotischky in prepared comments.

More specifically, Informa added, the Asia-Pacific region comprises 40 percent of the world's data revenues, more than $20 billion in the first quarter, representing an above average year-over-year growth rate of 48 percent.

The biggest regional riser, according to Informa, is the Middle East, which despite contributing just 2 percent of the world's data revenues in the first quarter of 2008, has seen a 91.7 percent year-over-year increase in this figure to $927 million.

Aiding this acceleration is a huge year-or-year rise in the number of HSPA subscribers in the region, which reached 2.9 million by the end of March 2008, according to Informa.

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