Dubai: Mobile broadband (3G/4G) accounts for more than a third of total connections in the Gulf States today and is as high as 60 per cent of the total connections in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, said Anne Bouverot, Director General of GSMA.
GSMA is an association of mobile operators and telecom companies devoted to supporting the standardising, deployment and promotion of the GSM mobile phone system.
She said that two of the markets — Qatar and the UAE — have the highest smartphone adoption rates in the world (80 per cent of connections).
According to the GSMA’s new report, “Arab States: Mobile Economy 2014”, which was released at the second GSMA Mobile 360 conference held on the sidelines of Gitex, there were 195 million unique mobile subscribers in the region at the end of 2013, a penetration rate of 53 per cent of the total population. Total mobile connections in the region stood at 404 million at year-end.
More than half of the population across the Arab States of the Middle East and North Africa are now subscribed to a mobile service, presenting the region with a “unique opportunity to use mobile technology to drive social and economic growth,” she said.
In the Gulf States, mobile is driving innovation in areas such as machine-to-machine and smart city solutions. “We are also seeing mobile networks play an important role in disaster response and crisis management,” Bouverot said.
According to Ahmad Abdul Karim Julfar, CEO of Etisalat Group, most of the growth will come from ICT-related activities enabled by the telco industry such as mobile internet, the internet of things, cloud technology automation of knowledge work and autonomous vehicles.
He said that the massive demand for high speed data will continue to drive the growth of telecom companies but finding more collaborative ways to work with over-the-top (OTT) companies will enable us to grow together.
By utilising the rich consumer data sets, “we can promote greater innovation, newer products and serve our consumers together. The future of telecom will thus be led by a collaborative value addition approach”, he said.
Ten years ago, he said that voice was bringing 90 per cent of the revenue; now the trend has reversed with data accounting for 35 to 50 per cent of the revenue. The industry, however, has been able to monetise just five per cent of the global mobile data traffic growth.
The report said that mobile industry in the Arab States has grown faster than the global average over the last five years. Unique mobile subscribers grew by 9.5 per cent per year between 2008 and 2013, compared to a global average growth of 8.2 per cent; mobile connections grew by 13.2 per cent per year over the same period, compared to an 11 per cent growth rate globally.
She said the mobile industry contributed $122 billion (Dh448 billion) to the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013, accounting for 4.4 per cent of the total. In that year, the industry directly employed nearly one million people, while an additional 600,000 jobs were supported across the rest of the economy as a result of activity generated by the mobile sector.
The local mobile industry also makes a significant contribution to public sector funding in the form of taxation ($13 billion in 2013), in addition to regulatory and spectrum fees.
Mobile operators in the region grew mobile revenue by seven per cent per year over the last five years, significantly above the global average of 4.6 per cent. Operators have invested $75 billion over the last six years on improving network coverage, increasing network capacity and deploying mobile broadband networks.
