The Asia-Pacific Mobile Data Market

Pyramid analyst Jane Buenaventura has put up a piece on the Asia Pacific region, which as she points out “is the global leader in developing mobile content”.
Some points:
“At YE2004, Pyramid Research estimated that revenues from mobile data applications in Japan generated around US$8.5bn. A large proportion of this comes from general Internet browsing and e-mail. Games, music and video downloads, advanced applications that are becoming mainstream in the country, make up 6 percent (US$633m) of this revenue pie. However, these nascent applications will be the short-term revenue drivers of revenue growth and in another three years, these applications will contribute US$9.7bn to an estimated US$22bn data applications market by 2010.”
And an interesting point about KDDI’s music service: “Despite the rather limited memory capacity of handsets, the tariff per song is rather inexpensive, which implies the commodity nature of the product. This gives incentives for consumers to spend repeatedly.” A (relatively) low price coupled with low amounts of memory to encourage people to buy repeatedly, as opposed to the approach taken in other countries…
And she notes that flat-rate data pricing is important to mobile content sales…

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