Global revenue growth rates provide the best evidence possible of why new revenue sources and business models must be developed in the mobile industry.
Traditional mobile revenues will have a compound annual growth rate of about one percent to 2020, GSMA Intelligence predicts, and virtually all of that growth will come in developing markets,
particularly India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Revenue in North America and Europe, for example, will be flat. In product life cycle terms, that means the mobile business now has reached the peak of its cycle in developed nations, though not yet in developing markets. Revenue decline follows.
Despite growth slowing, especially beyond 2020, China will account for around 40 percent
of global mobile revenue growth between 2017 and 2025.
The number of unique mobile subscribers will reach 5.9 billion by 2025, equivalent to 71 percent of the world’s population.
By 2025, two thirds of mobile connections (excluding cellular IoT) across the world will operate on high-speed networks, with 4G accounting for 53 percent of total mobile SIMs and 5G at 14 percent.
The number of Internet of Things (IoT) connections (cellular and non-cellular) will increase more than threefold worldwide between 2017 and 2025, reaching 25 billion.
