Frost & Sullivan: Vast Potential in Data for Malaysian Service Providers

Dec. 6, 2011 - PRLog -- Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – The Malaysian wireless broadband market is increasingly showing characteristics of a developed market. The rapid growth of smartphones saw the mobile broadband market enter a competition phase with the revival of Maxis and entry of YTL.

According to Nitin Bhat, Partner & Head of Consulting, Frost & Sullivan, the Malaysian market may go through a slugfest amongst the top broadband operators – with value proposition, pricing, cost/capacity management becoming pivotal success factors.

“Wireless broadband outpaced fixed broadband in 2009 and grew by 110% in 2010. However average revenue per user (ARPU) declined due to heavy promotions undertaken by all operators,” he said.

Malaysia experienced its ‘first SMS revenue’ decline in the last few quarters, and acceleration of decline in voice with the rapid growth of mobile broadband. Voice revenues declined 4% from RM13.90 billion in 2010 to RM13.34 billion in 2011 while wireless data grew 20% from RM7.79 billion in 2010 to RM9.34 billion in 2011.

Other broadband market trends include increasing Net Adds for Fiber in the country, driven predominantly by Unifi service by TM. Mobile broadband growth rates are also coming down dramatically compared to 2009 and 2010.

Bhat added, “There is huge potential in data for the Malaysian market. Frost & Sullivan estimates overall internet accessing devices to be greater than 15 million by 2015, including both small screen and large screen users.”

“With smartphone pricing rapidly falling, the smartphone strategy will be a big bet of all mobile operators going forward,” he continued.

Frost & Sullivan estimates an internet user base of 23-25 million by 2015 with 70% of them having access to a personal internet connection. Non-voice (Messaging, VAS, Mobile Internet, WBB) wireless revenues is also expected to exceed wireless voice revenues in 2013.

Bhat observed that increased smartphones and tablets usage also pave the way for mobile cloud and consumer social networking would continue to gain momentum and particularly in enterprise social networking.

2012: Cloud Computing is set to become mainstream in Malaysia.

According to a recent Frost & Sullivan study, 33% of Malaysian organizations will have adopted some form of cloud computing by 2012.

Decision makers in most large Malaysian organizations are recognizing the benefits of cloud computing, positioning the market for public cloud computing to grow from US$60 million in 2010 to US$235 million by 2015.

Andrew Milroy, Vice President, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific said, “Cloud computing has the ability to offer greater business agility, cost reduction and a switch in IT spending from capital investment to operational expenditure. Basically, cloud computing is becoming critical as a means of gaining a competitive advantage for today’s organizations.”

“The impact of the shift to cloud computing will become apparent. One of the first obvious effects of this type of technology is the cloud-driven transformation of whole industries. The IT industry itself is being transformed by cloud computing as consumers and businesses depend, to a greater extent, on smartphones and tablets,” he said.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is set to be the new battleground in the cloud computing industry as PaaS vendors seek to attract developers to their platforms. Today, Force.com has a huge advantage over other platforms as a result of its early entry into the market. However, over the last 18 months or so, new platforms have come online, supported by major vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google and VMWare. Two or three platforms can be expected to dominate as a critical mass of applications is developed on each.

Enterprise Communications market in APAC estimated worth of US$4.95 billion, a 10.8% increase in 2012

In general, the industry is growing at about 10% year-on-year, which is quite positive. The market for the entire Asia Pacific was valued at US$4.32 billion in 2010.

There has been increased consolidation as the industry matures. Current key players in the market on the hardware or software providers are Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM. The services side of enterprise communications and UC has seen increased interest from corporations, who are now more open to having a utility based pricing model on the cloud (pay depending on usage or over a period of time) as compared to CAPEX investment which was capital intensive.

This allows providers to better manage their finance in a predictable fashion when it comes to technology adoption or upgrades. There is still concern about the security and privacy of data in the cloud, and this is largely a question of trust. Service providers are focusing their efforts in this area, as well as offering corporations private and hybrid clouds to alleviate some of their concerns.

IP Telephony is expected to see high growth compared to analog based telephony in 2012 and growth is expected to be 14.5%. While IP penetration has been increasing it is still quite low in the emerging countries such as China, India, or Thailand for example, when compared to Australia, Japan, or South Korea. Major cities in emerging economies are better connected via IP in relative terms versus Tier 2 and 3 cities.  

The emergence of new and innovative solutions in the marketplace is another important factor, as is interoperability of solutions between different players in the market. Enterprise Video growth is forecasted to be around 18% to 23% in 2012.

Service providers will become more important in 2012 and the focus will shift from customers buying hardware/software based solutions from resellers to buying a managed service from service providers listed earlier in a cloud delivery model. Even so, this shift is expected to be gradual and take place over the next 3-4 years. Conferencing services in 2012 for audio, video and web is expected to be around 15% to 25%.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best-practice models to drive the generation, evaluation, and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 40 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit http://www.frost.com.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Donna Jeremiah
Corporate Communications – Asia Pacific
P: +603 6204 5832
E: djeremiah@frost.com

Carrie Low
Corporate Communications – Asia Pacific
P: +603 6204 5910
E: carrie.low@frost.com

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Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, partners with clients to accelerate their growth. The company's research and consulting services empower clients to generate, evaluate, and implement effective growth strategies.