Chetan Sharma, a contributor to this blog, releases a robust quarterly report on the US Wireless Data Market that is a must read for everyone following or writing about the industry. His most recent report covers Q107, although, I’m sure he’s got a Q2 report on deck. I’ll include a few highlights from the report below to whet your appetite for the whole story found here.

US wireless data market continues to grow at a steady pace offsetting any decline in voice revenues. Growth in both enterprise and consumer segments resulted in a $5B quarter for the industry (by comparison, in 2004, the total data revenues for the year were $4.6B). Given that approximately 60% of the revenues are from non-SMS applications and the subscriber penetration of data services is still low, we remain bullish on the US data market.

• US wireless data market got over the $5B mark in service revenues in any given quarter for the first time. Revenues jumped 12% from Q406 and over 68% from Q106 to approximately $5.5B for Q107.
• Overall ARPU remained at the same levels as Q106 and Q406, which speaks to the value of data revenues in the declining voice revenue market. While voice ARPU declined 6%, data ARPU rose 46% compared to Q106. The average data ARPU in the US stands at $8.34 or almost 16% of the service revenues.

Though the overall penetration of messaging is around 40%, in terms of total number of messages in the network, US had another blockbuster quarter. Verizon with 22.75B, T-Mobile with 16B, and AT&T with 14.23B messages (SMS and Multimedia messaging) were the leaders. Notice T-Mobile’s performance with less than half the number of subscribers compared to its peers.

• US wireless carriers maintained their strong showing vis-à-vis their peers worldwide. Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint maintained their ranking # 4, 5, and 6 respectively, amongst the top 10 operators worldwide in terms of total wireless data revenue generated for Q107. US is the only country with 3 operators who generated $1.4B or more in data revenues in the quarter.
• For the third straight quarter- TMO US outperformed its parent TMO Germany.

If you prefer a more global view of the wireless data market, check out Chetan’s Global Wireless Data Market Update 2006. Highlights include:

• Japan led the way with almost $20B in annual mobile data revenues. US and China were next with $15.8B and $9.2B respectively.
• NTT DoCoMo became the first carrier to cross the $10B barrier for a given calendar year amassing $10.5B for 2006 in data revenues. The Japanese market was followed by China Mobile at $6.9B, KDDI at $6.6B, Verizon Wireless at $4.5B, and Cingular Wireless at $4.3B. They were followed by Sprint Nextel, SK Telecom, Softbank, O2 UK, and China Unicom to make up the top 10.

In 2006, SMS’s vice like grip on data revenues loosened a bit with many carriers seeing an increase in non-SMS data revenues. On an average, Japan and Korea have over 70-75% of their revenue coming from non-SMS data applications, US around 50-60%, and Western Europe around 30-40%.