At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Airwide convened a roundtable designed to forecast the future of mobile messaging. The roundtable and Airwide’s accompanying report revealed that:

• Asia continues to demonstrate the strongest overall growth opportunity. However, ARPU remains low as does the per-minute cost of calls and services, leaving operators in a quandary over where to concentrate their efforts in terms of customer base.
• Mobile spam has been identified as a hot issue in China and will continue as such over the next five years. Similarly the threat of mobile viruses also looks set to increase.
• The Middle East illustrates the greatest potential for growth of emerging services such as mobile IM, email, videoconferencing and MMS.
• Europe sees mobile email, mobile music and MMS more ingrained services than many places in the world and there is growing confidence amongst operators that these services can provide a steady and sustained growth in revenues.
• In the United Kingdom, accelerated growth is expected in mobile versions of applications that are already firmly established. Mobile email is expected to double its share of the total market over the next five years.

Present at the roundtable were me, the CMO of Airwide Solutions; Mike Short, Chairman of the MDA and VP of Research and Development at O2; Andrew Bud, Vice Chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum and Executive Chairman of mBlox; John Darnbrough, Market Development Manager at the GSMA; Graham Rivers, CEO of WIN; Mark Newman, Chief Research Officer of Informa; Michele Scanlon, Founder of Green Giraffe Consulting and Paul Ruppert, Founder, Global Point View Ltd and contributor to industry blog, Mobile Messaging 2.0.

The roundtable sparked an interesting debate about how mobile use across the world has changed over the last few years. The debate discussed the differences in mobile phone use between the developing and more developed parts of the world and helped highlight the tremendous opportunities that lie ahead for mobile operators worldwide. The panel also debated some of the key themes from Mobile World Congress including mobile advertising, mobile payments and social networking.

Andrew Bud, Vice Chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum and Executive Chairman of mBlox commented: “SMS used for business-to-consumer purposes continues to be a runaway success worldwide: to illustrate this, in 2007, mBlox processed over 2 billion application-to-person transactions and grew by over 40%. By 2011 we can see carrier revenues from all wholesale enabling services more than doubling to $8bn, if they replicate SMS’ successful wholesale business model. At Mobile World Congress, the biggest theme was the huge opportunity for the entire industry in the emerging markets, where applications like mobile banking are already beginning to drive the mobile transactions business. With a market of over 3 billion consumers to reach and serve, there is a lot to be excited about.”

Mike Short, Chairman of the MDA and VP of Research and Development at O2 commented: “Text – we’ve only just begun. Fifteen years since the start of text is just the beginning. There remains much more to be done in 21st Century messaging from CRM to Enterprise Messaging, from screen interactivity to better memory stores of your favourite messages from mobile marketing to personalised alert services, from public sector services to charity text.”

Lord Digby Jones, Minister of State for Trade & Investment, said: “This report shows the strength and energy of the ICT sector in the UK. British firms in this business have to be at their creative and innovative best. The text message was created in Britain and the British public are always early adopters of technology. There were a record number of text messages sent in the UK last year. Now companies in the sector are innovating to include data messaging using picture and video. Once again British consumers are taking up the technology before many other markets around the world. Companies in the UK are only able to innovate to this extent because of the world-class research being done in British universities and the highly-skilled workforce. All these factors make British firms fantastic commercial partners and will allow them to remain world-leaders for many years to come.”

Audio from the roundtable is available in the Resources section of the Airwide corporate website (see the podcast section) along with the full-length global messaging trends report (see the whitepapers section). These will be featured in Airwide’s next corporate newsletter.