Market Corner - 02/03/08

A few set of market information released this week:

• According to Idate, there were 5m households passed with fiber (FTTH or FTTB) in Europe with 1m subscribers at the end of 2007. 201 projects are in deploying phase, most of them launched by municipalities or power utilities, ahead of telecom service providers (20%). Sweden, Italy, NL, Denmark are the most active countries with 86% of subscribers, but France is catching them fast with Orange, Free and Neuf Cegetel rapidly deploying their fiber access networks and targeting several millions subscribers by the end of 2012.

• According to In-Stat, the Chinese smartphone market grew by 38% in 2007 with shipments of 14.4m units. It is expected to reach 33m units in 2012.

• According to Parks Associates, free content will encourage selling premium offerings and seed the market.

• According to Telegeography, needs for bandwidth double every two years, but the trans-Pacific traffic grew with a CAGR of 64% between 2002 and 2007.

• According to Infonetics, the WiMAX equipment market grew 11% in 4Q07 and 46% in 2007 to $800m. Infonetics forecasts the WiMAX market to grow to $7.7bn in 2011. The number of worldwide WiMAX subscribers (fixed and mobile) topped 2.2m in 2007.

• ABI Research forecasts that there would be 90m 4G subscribers worldwide and 720m WCDMA users by 2013.

• There were 3.4bn mobile customers in the world, and 180m WCDMA subscribers at the end of 2007.

• According to Infonetics, the worldwide service provider VoIP and IMS market is forecast to grow to $8.4bn in 201, from $3.9bn in 2007. There were just under 80m VoIP subscribers worldwide in 2007.

• IMS Research reports that small, micro or pico projectors would be the next feature for a mobile device. 50M projectors would be built-in into mobile phones by 2012.

• Juniper Research forecasts that mobile music revenues are expected to reach $17.5bn by 2012.

• According to ECTA, European broadband connections grew to 92m.