The world's mobile operator community generated $965 billion (£595 billion) in annualised service revenues last year, according to the latest research from Informa Telecoms & Media. This annualised figure is expected to rise and exceed $1 trillion during 2011, before growing to $1.14 trillion by the end of 2015.
Thomas Wehmeier, Principal Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said “The operators may earn big, but it should never be forgotten that they also invest heavily to generate these returns. Deploying and operating mobile networks to support more than 5.3 billion connections is an extremely resource-intensive business and Informa Telecoms & Media estimates that operators worldwide invested more than US$175 billion in capex during 2010 alone. Cumulatively, total capex spend shelled out by operators has been in excess of US$1 trillion over the past decade.”
Informa also forecasts that revenues from all mobile data services, including SMS, will grow to $453 billion in 2015, up from just over $253 billion last year.