The U.S. search market appears to be pretty much wrapped up. Neither Yahoo nor Google is especially strong in mobile matters, though, and the fight becomes even more of a tossup in India, where mobile services are expected to assume “a high growth trajectory.”
That’s the stance of Boston Analytics, anyway, which analyzed the past, present, and future of mobile value added services in India. And if anything, Boston Analytics may have taken a conservative approach – James Quintana Pearce believes it significantly underestimated the number of cell phone subscribers.
On to the data, then. Boston Analytic’s graphs show India’s per capita GDP going up and mobile call tariffs going down. Also, mobile revenues appear to be rising, even though the average revenue per user is dropping. And these trends appear ready to continue for the foreseeable future.
So India’s shaping up to be an even more tempting spot for Google and Yahoo than it has been in the past. Other American companies – including AOL? – could also try out their mobile products in this market. (AOL has, by the way, given no indication that it would make such a move, but the company’s ongoing layoffs indicate that it needs to try something, and an expansion into the UK occurred just last month.)
We’ll see where this goes, but as with just about everything, don’t expect much to happen before the beginning of 2008.
