3G Platforms and IP Communications Slowly Replacing Wireline in Australia, Japan and Korea
SMBs in Australia, Japan and Korea are witnessing the continued growth of VoIP and triple play services, strong competition among 3G mobile operators in their telecommunications sector markets, the uptake of FTTP services—with a corresponding move away from DSL—and big strides taken in developing digital and mobile broadcasting.
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The SMB telecom market for Australia, Japan and Korea was approximately US $40 billion in 2008. A majority of the total developed APAC SMB spend came from Japan with VoIP and mobile data services making up for declines in legacy service offerings. Korea SMBs accounted for the next largest opportunity, driven by the growth of IP video telephony and WiMAX development. As broadband uptake for SMBs in Australia continues, 2008 saw a major shift from basic access to VoIP and hosted services being adopted by SMB.
“The aggregate opportunity of the APAC SMB telecom market is shrinking primarily due to continued displacement in local phone and long-distance service spending. Nonetheless, there are substantial growth areas; in order to be more productive in a mobile environment, firms migrate to IP telephony and continue to adopt smartphones and data plans. Video and web conferencing are increasingly gaining traction as these are driven by cost cutting initiatives and the need to be more efficient and collaborative,” said Ms. Gina Luk, Asia-Pacific Telecommunications and Networking Research Manager.
As digital cellular systems mature, attention is turning to 3G platforms. Mobile phones are rapidly becoming commodities; fierce price competition has set in to keep and win customers before the much-hyped next generation data services comes into play. 3G is driving a strong migration from cell phones to smart phones. The richness of mobile applications available for download will further solidify this transition. As more workers travel either locally or internationally there will be more occasion for workers to leave laptops in their offices, and use mobile and smart phones. User dependence on smart phones will continue increasing with a growing pool of downloadable applications. Smart phones are expected to be a long-term high-growth category in the SMB market.
“The developed APAC SMB telecom market also leads the region’s VoIP adoption with next generation IP communications systems deployment that is moving further away from the old voice-centric model towards a desktop applications-centric model that retains the client’s server structural design elements,” noted Ms. Luk.
Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, and NEC are the key IP communications vendors in the developed APAC SMB market. Their market success in this region will continue to be based on shifting their customers’ focus from voice features to the network infrastructure supporting a mix of communications, including voice, data, text, image and video.
For more information about this study, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, call 212-944-5100, e-mail or visit the AMI website at http://www.ami-partners.com.
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.