Africa and the Middle East are showing strong growth in SMS traffic, and are set to double SMS-based revenue by 2010, says international research house, Portico Research.
Portico says the region will show a 114% revenue growth by 2010, doubling last year's revenue to $2.02 billion.
Last year, the MEA region generated $1.02 billion revenue from SMS traffic, a 38% growth from 2005. The SMS revenue will grow 25% year on year, amounting to $1.28 billion this year, the research house says.
In terms of traffic, Africa and the Middle East region will account for 3.5% of global messaging volumes by 2010, says BulkSMS head of marketing, Glen Thompson.
'Little cousin'
Speakers at the Global Messaging 2007 Conference, held in Monte Carlo earlier this month, showed that SA has the highest volumes of business-related application-to-person (A2P) messaging in the world.
The conference revealed SA as the only country of the 32 participating, where all the major banks had adopted SMS messaging.
Speaking at the convention, Gabi Porter, product manager for messaging at Vodacom, said business-related A2P messaging is an important revenue stream for Vodacom.
"Africa's contribution is to increase, but it is still the little cousin in world terms," says BulkSMS head of marketing, Glen Thompson.
BulkSMS CEO Pieter Streicher says the use of SMS by government, business and organisations is only just starting on a global scale and is growing rapidly.
SMS messaging is used for disaster alerts, employee notifications, as well CRM and ERP communications, he says.
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