Barry Welford 2009-03-12
As The Economist points out for Mobile telecoms in the recession, it is Boom in the bust.
Despite the recession, the mobile industry is enjoying a promising transformation. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, although many bemoaned the downturn, on the show floor it was hard to keep track of all the new "smart" phones and services.
Makers of handsets will be hard hit: unit sales are expected to fall by at least 10% this year, having increased by 6% in 2008 to 1.2 billion. But at the same time the industry is going through a transformation that promises to fuel rapid growth in the years to come. To draw a parallel from computing, it is as if the personal computer (PC), its graphical user-interface, high-speed internet access and open-source software had all taken off at the same time.The momentum has been created by a newcomer to the mobile industry: Apple. By the end of 2008 it had sold more than 17m of its elegant iPhones, and there have been over 500m downloads from its "App Store" since its launch last July. Others are now following in Apple's footsteps. In Barcelona, for instance, Microsoft and Nokia, the world's largest software firm and handset-maker respectively, announced their own application stores. Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry, and Google, the world's biggest internet firm, have done the same.
It is likely that the current operators will not be the ones who control the mobile internet. Others such as Apple, Google or Nokia, are more likely to become the gatekeepers.
Informa, a market-research firm, projects revenues from content and data services of $240 billion by 2012. Despite the economic turmoil elsewhere, the industry seems justified in its confidence that the smart-phone is finally emerging as a powerful, innovative and lucrative new computing platform.One interesting question to ponder in all this is who will come through the recession with the best resources to capitalize on this inevitable growth in the Mobile Web.
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