Worldwide economic slowdown has shown little impact on the SMS traffic as the number of people text messaging across the EU grew by 3.3% year on year, and those sending MMS went up by 9.2%, finds a study by comScore M:Metrics.
In the UK, 25 million SMS are sent each day, with people earning over £30,000 sending 16.9% more messages in 2008 than a year earlier. The growth rate among those earning less than £30,000 is 4%.
France stands in the second place with a growth of 8.1%. The number of MMS in the country increased 15.2% than in 2007. This is the highest MMS growth across Europe.
Airwide Solutions, a provider of mobile messaging services, has revealed the results of comScore study, which has covered the use of mobile messaging across the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
Airwide predicts growth in mobile messaging in Asia and Africa where fixed lines are expensive. It says that the growth in the Western world will be triggered by personalised services such as out-of-office, auto-forward and storage/back-up capabilities.
comScore study vouches a report released by Portio Research earlier in December. Portio’s report predicts that the mobile messaging industry, which is worth $130 billion in 2008 would grow up to $224 billion by 2013 — 60% of non-voice service revenues.
While mobile email users worldwide will quadruple from about 250 million in 2008 to over a billion by the end of 2013, mobile instant messaging users will increase from the present 111 million to 867 million by 2013. Portio has found that the number of worldwide MMS traffic increased to 75 billion messages in 2008.
Content from our partners
