This stat has changed several hands today as it made its way up the meme chain, but according to Tomi Ahonen, via Open Gardens, SMS brought in $75 billion worldwide in 2005. Tomi says:
To put it in context, Hollywood box office is a bit below 30 B USD. Global music industry revenues are about 35B. Videogaming, consoles and all software are about 40. And the total value of all laptop computers sold in 2005 was about 65 B USD. SMS alone earns more than any of those industries…. And SMS is still over 90% profit.
Applications like SMS come along probably only once in an industry. Mobile TV, mobile music, none of these will provide the sort of simplicity, ease of use, "virality" or margins that SMS does. Anyone have suggestions for the next such application, if at all?
March 16th, 2006 at 8:06 am
Hi Scott and the Mobile Weblog
Thank you for finding the story, ha-ha. Yes, its bounced around the web a bit before hitting you. And yes, 75 Billion dollars, that is rather serious money, espeically as almost 90% of that is profit…
Bigger than Hollywood. Bigger that the global music industry. Bigger than videogaming worldwide. And still growing.
By the way, it is only 12% of the global wireless carrier/mobile operator revenues (Europe SMS is between 15%-20%, some Asian countries well ahead of that with the Philippines SMS forming over 35% of revenues).
And as a further bit of analysis, the Norwegian incumbent, Telenor, reports this split of total messaging revenues in their network: about 90% is person-to-person SMS, 9% is premium SMS like TV voting, and 1% is MMS picture messaging.
Oh, for more of my thoughts visit us at my blogsite http://www.communities-dominate.blogs.com
Tomi Ahonen
four time bestselling author and consultant