Market news N49

A few set of market information released this week:

[                  According to Juniper Research, the global Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) market will reach $42bn in 2005.

[                  According to The Diffusion Group, consumers are increasingly comfortable with the idea of listening to music or viewing video on their mobile phones.

[                  Infonetics forecasts healthy growth for the WiFi market from 2006.

[                  218bn SMS pieces were sent last year in China, a 59% surge yoy, and driving revenues of about $18bn.

[                  Mexico will implement “calling party pays” in April at domestic level.

[                  According to Dell’Oro, global WLAN equipment revenues would grow 13% to $ 2.6bn in 2005 and $4.3bn by 2009.

[                  Western Europe RFID revenues could reach $ 1.1bn in 2007, according to Juniper Research.

[                  Dittberner sees Italtel as EMEA VOIP leader with 37% market share.

[                  Dell’Oro predicts mobile infra revenues could increase through 2007 from current $36bn to $ 39bn and then plateau until 2009.

According to GSA, there were currently 64 WCDMA networks commercially deployed in 31 countries, plus 5 networks in pre-commercial deployment, on a current total of 130 WCDMA license holders. That means that about 50% of the license holders are still to launch services. There are about 43 EDGE networks deployed in 32 countries and a potential total of 80 GSM/GPRS operators that have committed to upgrade their networks.

4Q mobile phone ranking:

              Company        unit sold           market share

1              Nokia                 66.1m             33.1%

2              Motorola            31.8m             15.9%

3             Samsung            21.2m             10.6%

4             LG                      13.9m               7%

5             Siemens             13.5m              6.7%

6             Sony Ericsson    12.6m              6.3%