Telecom revenue growth continues to wane across all geographic regions, says IHS’s Infonetics Research. A mobile price war “is taking a bite” out of revenues of the largest carriers in the U.S., while all five of Europe’s largest telecom providers are likewise experiencing revenue declines, “though less pronounced than in the past three years,” according to the latest market data from IHS Infonetics.
Growing revenues from enterprise networking and communications offered a welcome respite, co-author of Infonetics’, “Global Telecom and Datacom Market Trends and Drivers” report Matthias Machowinski noted.
“After a weak 2013, enterprise networking and communication revenue growth accelerated in 2014 thanks to a resurging North American market and stepped-up investments in security infrastructure. We expect similar results in 2015, when strong end-user demand in North America and Asia Pac is likely to be offset by a slowdown in Europe.”
Telecom Revenue Growth Trends
Infonetics highlights the following major trends that impacted revenues in the global telecom and datacom market in 2014:
- Macroeconomic indicators point to moderate global economic growth of 3 percent for the full-year 2014 due to persistent weaknesses in the Eurozone and a significant slowdown in Brazil and Russia;
- Global mobile service revenue barely budged in the first half of 2014 (1H14), up just 0.5 percent from the same period a year ago, badly dragged by Europe again;
- Mobile data services (text messaging and mobile broadband) rose again in every region in 1H14, driven by the increasing usage of smartphones;
- Mobile broadband services grew 26 percent year-over-year, enough to offset the decline of SMS revenue;
- Key trends affecting the enterprise networking and communication markets include the adoption of cloud services, the use of cloud architectures in enterprise data centers, and security becoming a part of every IT decision.
