The emerging market regions of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Latin America remain a major focus area and growth opportunity for both vendors and telecoms service providers. Wireless technologies and services in particular have been central to enabling the communications explosion over the last decade that has in many ways revolutionized the lives and the economies of the people based there.
The Emerging Markets practice will drive analysis and insight into the leading opportunities, challenges, and issues facing service providers and vendors in the wireless sectors of the emerging markets. The nature of the market and competitive dynamics in these regions is undergoing some delicate but a very important shifts. Data services, broadband, content, and applications such as mobile banking which are still in their infancy are set to be central to maintaining the growth momentum for the industry going forward. We will focus on the leading technology challenges including mobile broadband traffic management and migration to LTE, as well as the best practices in exploiting the opportunities in data and value-added services such as mobile banking. We will continue to focus on tracking the subtle changes in leading vendor, service provider, and end-user dynamics in the emerging markets.
- Major shifts in emerging market industry planes
Signature Research
Mobile content in the emerging markets
This study will examine how service providers, device vendors, platform vendors, and content providers are positioning to capture the mobile data and content opportunity in the emerging markets. Less than a third of emerging market users venture beyond voice, SMS, and personalization content services, making mobile data a massive opportunity. However, in many markets network, device, content, and income limitations set a challenging set of constraints for the players positioning to exploit this opportunity.
Key Themes
Wireless access in the emerging markets
Wireless technologies will remain the key platform for connecting the billions of users in the emerging markets. There is a relative simplicity in the wireless voice technology mix, but that is not the case for the rapidly growing data market. Service providers are faced with a mix of spectrum, technology, service, and marketing choices and challenges as they try to maximize their position in their increasingly competitive markets.
Within this theme we will provide analysis and insight into service provider and vendor strategies for migration to HSPA, WiMAX, and LTE technologies. We will examine the development of mobile broadband services in emerging markets and assess best-practice strategies in both big screen and small screen services. We will also provide research and insight into the business models for wireless infrastructure deployment, sharing, and outsourcing.
Beyond voice: data and value-added services in the emerging markets
Voice remains the mainstay revenue and profit generator in the emerging markets. Growing competition and eroding voice ARPU has crystallized service providers’ realization that they must make serious investments to capture the data and value-added services opportunity, including mobile content, applications, and banking services.
Within this theme we will provide insight into key non-voice revenue opportunities in the emerging markets, and the approaches of service providers and vendors in capturing them. In addition to mobile broadband, we will focus on mobile banking, which is a major opportunity in the emerging markets amid low banking penetration. Moreover, we will continue to analyze the opportunities in content, applications, and messaging services.
Enterprise mobility in the emerging markets
There has been a growing demand for tailored enterprise mobility services and solutions among the emerging market enterprises, and a number of service providers are putting teams and solutions in place to address this need. With most SMEs and many large enterprises continuing to rely on often inadequate consumer services, this remains a major opportunity for service providers and vendors.
Within this theme we will examine the growing range of enterprise mobility solutions for both large enterprises and SMEs. We will examine service provider best-practice strategies as well as enterprise needs, differences, and changes in demand across markets.
Strategies for the next billion
Serving the next billion (or two) of still unserved potential users in the emerging markets will be a massive opportunity, yet also a challenge for the industry. Most of these people are based in remote rural areas, and often have low incomes. Providing communications services profitably to these users will require a different approach and business model to those that service providers deployed in large and dense urban areas.
Within this theme we will examine three key areas that are the building blocks for this topic. The first are the wireless technology solutions that are required to enable commercially viable network coverage of these customers. The second includes the services and business models that service providers must deploy. The final piece is the devices the vendors must devise that will be both attractive and affordable to such users.
