SMS traffic explodes across Asia Pacific during holidays

Stan Beer
Thursday, 29 January 2009 05:07

IT Industry - Market

The economic downturn does not seem to have impacted the mobile messaging market with the 2008/09 Christmas and New Year Period seeing a phenomenal spike in the number of SMS messages sent across the Asia Pacific networks serviced by a leading messaging company.

According to messaging systems provider Acision, a total of 6.37 billion text messages were delivered through its messaging systems across Asia Pacific over the 2008/2009 Christmas and New Year period. SMS messages formed a large majority of the traffic with 6.36 billion messages, while MMS messages were recorded at 9.54 million messages.

The number of messages sent over the recent holiday period represents a hefty increase of 40% over the same period for the previous year.
 
The top five countries with the highest SMS traffic processed over the festive season were the Philippines with 2.36 billion messages, followed by Indonesia (1.193 billion), Malaysia (1.075 billion) and Pakistan (763 million).

Australia, despite its small populayion was also no slouch in the messaging stakes. With 21 million subscribers and 100% mobile penetration rate, Australia’s messaging traffic saw a spike this festive season with 153 million messages, 2.6 million of which was MMS traffic. This represents a 57% growth in messaging volume compared to the same period last year.

In terms of year-on-year growth, Pakistan was the trend setter with traffic volume growing by 253% compared to last year during the same period. Other markets that experienced high messaging growth include Philippines (65%), Indonesia (27%) and Malaysia (13%).

Indonesia and Pakistan, with large populations, also represent areas of great opportunity for further growth as both countries still have relatively low mobile phone penetration rates of 50% and 56% respectively.
 
“The festive season still remains a favourite high traffic period for operators and consumers alike. Compared to last year’s traffic, this year the total messaging traffic in Asia Pacific grew by 40%," said Boudewijn Pesch, Managing Director of Acision, Asia Pacific.

"In addition, we are seeing MMS traffic picking up pace across the region with 9.5 million MMS messages processed during this festive season. MMS traffic is bound to increase as consumers become increasingly savvy in interacting with their personal blog sites and applications such as Facebook.”