Mobile Subscriber Growth To Slow, Handset Sales To Fall In 2009: Report

Informa Telecoms and Media reports that the global mobile subscription market grew by 18.5 percent in 2008 compared to 2007, lower than the previous annual growth rate of 22.5 percent. The analyst predicts that the global subscription market will increase by 12.7 percent year-over-year in 2009, partly as Western Europe and the USA are already mature. On a related note, Parks Associates predicts that there will be more than 2.5 billion 3G subscribers globally by 2013, up from a bit over 500 million now, with about 1 billion in Asia. They reckon this will drive mobile/fixed line convergence.

Juniper Research has predicted that the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will grow their combined subscriber base from 1.21 billion last year to 1.64 billion by 2013. “Revenues from mobile data services will rise from $26 billion in 2008 to $48 billion by 2013, with China accounting for the majority of such revenues,” reports IntoMobile.

Meanwhile, Informa predicts that handset sales will fall by 4.76 percent in 2009 due to a longer replacement cycle — and naturally developed markets are going to see a sharper downturn than developing markets. “The handset market is facing a difficult period with the average replacement cycle likely to increase by 6-8 months in 2009, which would result in a 5 percent y-o-y decline in the number of total devices sold globally to 1.16 billion,” said senior forecasting analyst at Informa Nidhir Maudgalya. “And things could get even worse than this, as depending on the extent of the deterioration of global macroeconomic conditions, the y-o-y fall in the number of total devices sold could double to 10 percent with replacement cycles increasing to up to 12 months.”

Apparently it could take 3 years to get back to 2008 levels. Obviously this would be bad news for handset manufacturers, but good news for the environment as it would mean less toxic handset waste. It is also probably bad news for mobile content developers, since people often to spend quite a bit of money on mobile content when the get a new handset, and then stop until they replace it. However, the content industry was already working to change this, and there’s also the argument that people might be willing to buy more applications if they didn’t think they were going to toss their handset in a months.