Broadband, smartphones drive business mobile market growth

Peter Dinham
Monday, 31 August 2009 09:01

IT Industry - Market

Australian businesses are seemingly brushing aside the economic woes of the current downturn and increasingly spending money on mobile services - particularly mobile broadband and smartphones - with total spending in the market predicted to grow to $6.5 billion by the end of this year.

Research group, Telsyte, said today spending on mobile services by businesses in Australia will grow by 10 percent in 2009, with the strongest growth coming from non-voice usage driven by mobile broadband and smartphones.

Telsyte research director, Warren Chaisatien, said today the economic crisis had forced Australian businesses to do more with less, with “cost cutting, productivity and collaboration taking centre stage,” and he revealed, “more than ever, mobile technologies have become a vital business tool used to achieve that goal.”

While the overall business use of mobile applications continues to grow, Chaisatien said Australian firms have been “looking inward and becoming more cautious about mobilising externally-facing mobile applications. As a result, Telsyte has detected a slowdown in the growth of adoption of line-of-business mobile applications like CRM this year.”

According to Chaisatien, Telstra’s dominance in the business mobile market is the most pronounced in mobile broadband, where users consider network coverage and reliability the most critical carrier attributes, far ahead of competitive pricing.

“Although across-the-board mobile broadband pricing has dropped by half, fuelled by the emergence of MVNO providers, business ARPU has held up pretty well and declined by 15% year-on-year. The average spending remains well north of $80.”

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