Fueled by demand for content such as sports video, music and gaming, the Latin America mobile value-added services market is seeing unprecedented growth and will outpace almost all other regions over the next few years, according to separate studies from Informa Telecoms & Media and Frost & Sullivan. And younger consumers appear to be most responsible for the boom.
Informa Telecoms earlier this month said mobile value-added services adoption will multiply at a 15.1 percent compound annual growth rate in the next five years, three times faster than the rest of the world. The total revenue, in Informa’s estimation, will jump from $10.8 billion in 2009 to $21.6 billion in 2014.
Frost’s calculations are slightly more conservative. The research firm predicts, in a forthcoming study, that the mobile content market will swell at a double-digit rate in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, translating into 150.4 million users in those six countries by 2014 and generating $5.5 billion in sales, José Roberto Mavignier, industry manager in Frost’s Latin America division, told VON/xchange. And, Mavignier added, by that time, subscription services will be overshadowed by individual music, gaming and TV/video consumption.
Indeed, when it comes to TV and video, network operators can look forward to major soccer competitions – the Confederations Cup in 2013 and the World Cup in 2014 in Brazil – for the expected surge in bandwidth and services use. Soccer's “paramount role in Latin culture,” said Mavignier, will drive Latin America’s mobile TV and video adoption as those events near. The World Cup hasn’t taken place in the Latin American region for 24 years.
In between all the futbol fever, though, people in Latin America will continue to look to music and gaming for entertainment. Young people, most of all, are “really eager to add mobility to their favorite artists, and make their music play in their cars, music players and cell phones,” Mavignier said. Service providers and the music industry will profit not only from downloads, then, but also from sales of ring tones, ringback tones, wallpaper downloads and video-clip downloads.
