StatShot: Asia-Pac To Lead 3G Subscriptions
Asia-Pac region would lead the world with 564 million 3G subscriptions by 2013 versus 158.4 million in 2008, according to research from Frost & Sullivan. Doh! With countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China and India should we be surprised? They think 37 million people will get their broadband using dongles and data cards by 2013 and will bring in revenues of $7.8 billion versus $1.3 billion in revenues from 5.2 million external devices. No wonder Chinese vendors like ZTE and Huawei are busy making these devices.
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At this moment in time they have no 3G in India or China. This biggest market is Indonesia which is not very open and has problems with coverage.
As someone working in Europe’s Mobile Industry I have to say that coverage is an issue when it comes to mobile broadband. We are seeing Networks looking to share radio access networks and the last 5 quarters we have seen a boom in Mobile Broadband. The real test for the technology will be later this year when Vodafone launch HSDP+ with the help of Huawei and Qualcomm in Spain, Italy and the UK. This service will gives speeds great than possible from ADSL and it will give an idea of what people might pay for when it comes to high speed wireless data services.
Have to say that some of the assumptions made by Senior Analysts from Frost & Sullivan are questionable this report might be one of those.
Ian,
I respectfully disagree.
China recently approved long-awaited licenses for 3G mobile networks. China Mobile will build and operate a 3G network based on TD-SCDMA while China Unicom and China Telecom will build networks based on WCDMA and CDMA 2000, respectively. The country already has over 600 million mobile subscribers and this is only at a 60% penetration rate. Given the enormous user base and the population’s average spending power, the Chinese MNOs have historically charged very low fees for voice and data (GPRS) and it would not surprise me if 3G charges are also very low and affordable for the masses.
The great majority of users in Japan (100+ million) and Korea (~50 million) already regularly use mobile internet services. If we add other mature or developing markets like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia and assume some 3G penetration in places like Thailand and Vietnam (each with approx. 50 million mobile subscribers), then numbers become quite meaningful.
If we added very conservative estimates for India (350+ million) and Indonesia (110+ million), we can probably reasonably get to 564 million 3G subscriptions in Asia-Pac by 2013.
In my humble opinion, F&S’s assumptions may actually turn out to be too conservative.
Om is right though, the big winners are certainly the likes of Huawei and ZTE.
Cheers,
Tai