$157 Billion Telecom API Revenue Opportunity?

Telephony application program interfaces can generate as much as $157 billion in global revenues by 2018, growing at a CAGR of 38 percent between 2013 and 2018, according to Mind Commerce. 

The Asia Pacific, North America and Western Europe region will remain to be the largest market segments by the end of 2018, while the Latin America and Central America and Middle East and Africa regions will see the healthiest growth rates over the next five years.

The subscriber data management category will witness the fastest growth rate and will eventually account for $29 billion in global revenue by the end of 2018. 

The average volume of API transactions for a tier one wireless carrier will eventually reach 167 billion transactions a month on average.

Telecom APIs allow carriers to generate revenue by exposing network features to third-party service or application providers. 

Examples include network quality of service for video services, subscriber data management for advertising and profiling. 

Today nearly 24 percent of all Web and 15 percent of all mobile applications utilize APIs, the report suggests. This figure is expected to increase to over 80 percent by the end of 2018.