Juniper forecasts that annual mobile roaming revenues, worth an estimated $54 billion in 2016, will decline to $48 billion in 2017 as revenues generated from increased usage in many markets fail to offset those lost by lower roaming charges in the EU.
That represents an 11 percent decline in 2017.
But that is only part of a larger problem, Juniper Research suggests. Globally, account growth continues, as customers in developing countries become mobile subscribers. But that essentially accounts for all account growth in the global business.
And then there is revenue. We might already have reached “peak mobile,” in terms of revenue. In other words, it is conceivable that total industry revenue will begin to shrink, from this point forward, for the foreseeable future.
In part, that is a result of account saturation (everyone who wants to buy the service already does so) as well as declining average revenue per account.
The bigger potential problem is value shifts within the internet ecosystem, which the whole telecom industry now is part of.
Telecom is not a “growth” industry. To be sure, “telecom” was not a growth industry in its monopoly phase, either. It was a utility. In the competitive era, telecom has managed to grow its revenue and scale, based largely on huge growth of mobility services in developing nations.
In developed markets, “telecom” arguably has reached saturation. And that is the larger problem: how to reignite at least enough growth to allow the industry (especially in developed markets, at the moment) to maintain steady revenue growth rates, as legacy revenues shrink.
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