Monday Note

As seen last week in Barcelona, the mobile industry is red hot. The media sector will have to work harder to capture its share of that growth.

The 2013 edition of the Mobile World Congress held last week in Barcelona was as large as the biggest auto-show in the world: 1500 exhibitors and a crowd of 72,000 attendees from 200 countries. The mobile industry is roaring like never before. But the news media industry lags and will have to fight hard to stay in the game. Astonishingly, only two media companies deigned to show up: Pearson with its huge education business accounting for 75% of its 2012 revenue (vs. 7% for its Financial Times unit); and Agence France-Presse which is entering the customized application market. No other big media brand in sight, no trade organizations either. Apparently, the information sector is about to miss the mobile train.

Let’s begin with data that piqued my interest, from AT Kearney surveys for the GSM Association.

Individual mobile subscribers: In 2012, the worldwide number of mobile subscribers reached 3.2 billion. A billion subscribers was added in the last four years. As the world population is expected to grow by 1.1% per year between 2008 and 2017, the mobile sector enjoyed a 8.3% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) for the 2008-2012 period. For the 2012 – 2017 interval the expected CAGR is 4.2%. The 4 billion subscribers mark will be passed in 2018. By that time, 80% of the global population will be connected via a mobile device.

The rise of the machines. When machine-to-machine (M2M) connections are taken into account, growth becomes even more spectacular: In 2012, there were 6.8 billion active SIM cards, 3% of them being M2M connections. In 2017, there will be 9.7 billion active SIM cards and the share of M2M connections will account for 13% with almost 1.3 billion devices talking to each other.
The Asia-Pacific region will account for half of the connection growth, both for individual subscriptions and M2M.

We’ll now turn to stats that could benefit the media industry.

Mobile growth will be mostly driven by data usage. In 2012, the volume of data exchanged through mobile devices amounted to .9 exabytes per month (1 exabyte = 1bn gigabytes), this is more than the all preceding years combined! By 2017, it is expected to reach 11.2 exabytes, that’s a 66% CAGR!

A large part of this volume will come from the deployment of 4G (LTE) networks. Between now and 2017, deploying LTE technology will result in a 4X increase in connection speeds.

For the 2012 – 2017 period, bandwidth distribution is expected to grow as follows:

M2M:......... +89% 
Video:....... +75% 
Gaming:...... +62% 
Other data:...+55% 
File sharing: +34% 
VoIP:........ +34%

Obviously, the huge growth of video streaming (+75%) points to a great opportunity for the media industry as users will tend to watch news capsules on-the-go in the same way they today look at a mobile web sites or an app (these two will be part of the 55% annual growth).

The growing social mobility will also be an issue for news media. Here are the key figures for today in active mobile users

Facebook:...680m 
Twitter:....120m 
LinkedIn:....46m 
Foursquare:..30m

Still, as important as it is, social usage only accounts for 17 minutes per day, vs. 25 minutes for internet browsing and a mere 12 minutes for voice calls. Most likely, the growth of video will impact the use of social networks as Facebook collects more and more videos directly uploaded from smartphones.

A large part of this growth will be driven by the rise of inexpensive smartphones. Last week in Barcelona, the largest stand was obviously Samsung’s. But a huge crowd also gathered around Huawei or ZTE showing sophisticated Android-powered smartphones — at much lower prices. This came as a surprise to many westerners like me who don’t have access to these Chinese devices. And for emerging markets, Firefox is coming with a HTML5 operating system that looked surprisingly good.

In years to come, the growing number of operating systems, screen sizes and features will be a challenge. (At the MWC, the trend was definitely in favor of large screens, read this story in Engadget.) An entire hall was devoted to applications — and software aimed at producing apps in a more standardized, economical fashion. As a result, we might see three approaches to delivering contents on mobile:
- The simplest way will be mobile sites based on HTML5 and responsive design; more features will be embedded in web applications.
- The second stage will consist of semi-native apps, quickly produced using standardized tools, allowing fast updates and adaptations to a broad range of devices.
- The third way will involve expensive deep-coded native apps aimed at supporting sophisticated graphics; they will mainly be deployed by the gaming industry.

In upcoming Monday Notes, we will address two majors mobile industry trends not tied to the media industry: Connected Living (home-car-city), a sector likely to account for most machine-to-machine use; and digital education taking advantage of a happy combination of more affordable handsets and better bandwidth.

– frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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