According to Informa Telecoms & Media, during 2007 and into 2008, the market for prepaid mobile services has continued to grow more than twice as fast as the contract market. At the end last year, there were 2.33 billion prepaid subscriptions in the world, of which nearly 2% were accounted for by prepaid WCDMA accesses. Prepaid services generated $241.9 billion in revenues for mobile network operators in 2007, with 43% of global subscriptions or almost 30% of revenues coming from Asia Pacific region. The number of people owning multiple SIM cards continues to rise, and at the end of 2008 about 28.9% of reported subscriptions worldwide will be accounted for by secondary or tertiary SIM card ownership.
Informa predicts that by 2013 there will be 3.93 billion prepaid subscriptions, generating revenues of $382.2 billion. Prepaid subscription growth will slow down to a global CAGR of just over 9% from 2007-2013, but that market will still account for over 80% of new mobile subscriptions over the period.
Not surprisingly, the growth will come from new customers in developing markets, existing prepaid customers who prepared to increase their spending on value-added services, as well as contract customers who will use prepaid bolt-ons for mobile broadband applications and hybrid tariff plans.
As for the developed markets, operators will seek ways to maximise the value of their prepaid customer base. One of the ideas is to enable customers to tailor their services to with introduction of hybrid tariff plans.
New prepaid mobile applications are a potential diversification route available to all operators, and one that is particularly attractive to operators in emerging markets. By diversifying their revenue streams into related mobile applications and maximizing the use of their mobile customer base and billing/recharge relationship, operators can potentially increase the network usage and improve their ROI, even in a very-low-ARPU context.