Telcos Look to Enterprise for Revenue Growth

Telecom service providers will grow their revenues from global services to enterprise customers to more than US$297 billion by 2020. If so, enterprise services might well represent the fastest-growing part of the business.

The biggest contribution will come from new strategic ICT services revenues at nearly US$173 billion, which will increase at a CAGR of 9.9 percent over the period 2015 to 2020.

By some estimates, that would mean enterprise revenue grows exactly as fast as consumer revenue.

But those growth projections might be optimistic. Recent mobile revenue growth rates have been sluggish, and far less than nine percent annually, drastically less, in the case of mobile revenue, which has been the global revenue driver for more than a decade.

In fact, two percent global revenue growth likely will be the case in 2015, year over year.

Strategic ICT services include business IT and IP applications, compute and hosting, enterprise mobility, managed networks, professional services, and unified communications.

They represent the new generation of dedicated IT and IP communications services that telecoms service providers are able to offer under contracts with enterprise customers, Ovum says.

Regionally, the growth areas for telco strategic services are in Latin America (17.8 percent CAGR), Africa (17.5 percent), the Middle East (16.4 percent), and Central Asia (13.0 percent). The big markets of 2015 – Europe and North America – will grow more slowly, but will still be the largest in 2020.

“Telcos have taken more than 14 percent of the global ICT services market in the last couple of years,” Ovum said.  “We expect that share to reach more than 18 percent by 2020.”