Non-SMS Data Revenues US$11.3 Billion In First Quarter

(c) MocoNews

In the first quarter of this year global mobile data revenues from services other than SMS were US$11.3 billion according to Informa’s World Cellular Data Metrics (WCDM). This is a 39.5 percent year-on-year increase, with the first quarter of 2006 showing US$8.1 billion in non-SMS data revenues. Overall nearly a third of mobile data revenues now come from non-SMS services, but this varies significantly between carriers. KTF in Korea saw 70 percent of data revenues coming from non-SMS sources, while for Vodafone Egypt the figure was just 1 percent. Verizon Wireless clocked in at just over 50 percent and Sprint pulled about 55 percent. Here is a word doc with a few more telcos.

It’s a good sign for content, but also for SMS, since worldwide SMS traffic increased about 50 percent year-on-year to more than 620 billion messages for the quarter. SMS revenues increased 23 percent, and total global data revenues were US$34.3 billion for the quarter.