Messaging company Acision announced a compilation of predictions for the global mobile market, drafted around its business domains including messaging, mobile broadband, mobile marketing and charging for 2009. While it anticipates for a tough year ahead with the economic meltdown but it expects to meet ample revenue opportunities for the service providers.

On a proportionate basis, Acision forecasts messaging and its related revenues to increase globally even around the economic bleak. While making 2008/2009 New Year SMS figures as a benchmark, Acision finds SMS as a favorite medium of communication and can prove a major source of revenue driver for service providers if companies in mature and saturated markets like North America, Europe and parts of Asia-Pac if they sweat underutilized network assets.

While in the emerging markets of Africa and parts of Asia, where fixed-line infrastructure is limited, basic mobile messaging services will also remain a cost effective form of communicating for users,” says Steven van Zanen, VP of product marketing at Acision,

Acision projects the mobile marketing to remain in its fledgling stage in 2009, with mobile operators continuing to toy around with largely single-channel solutions. And as a means to increase its revenue, service providers will have to leverage more from the mobile marketing value chain they already have in place, said Acision.

“Budgets are shrinking, however the mobile’s direct route to the consumer is increasing its appeal as a marketing mechanism. To fully kick off mobile marketing, service providers need to monetise mobile messaging as a vehicle for advertising, work with the brands to enable advert insertion as part of the existing communications streams, provide end user control so subscribers can opt-in or receive some level of reward and increase advertising relevance based on a customer’s identity and full context such as location, usage and device capabilities,” said van Zanen

Mobile broadband turned a corner in 2008, particularly in mature markets. Acision foresees a nine-fold increase in global mobile broadband revenues by 2012, but provided the operators put the right solutions in place to control traffic volumes over the network.

At present, it says, network backhaul costs are already one of the largest cost items in the operator’s financial sheet, and with mobile broadband traffic levels expected to quickly grow to well over 20 times today’s volumes, this poses a serious threat to profitability. If left unchecked, operators will be confronted with network upgrades or backhaul outsourcing contracts running to billions of dollars - a hard pill to swallow in a tougher climate.

Acision believes that long term profitability will only be secured if operators consider this challenge and employ a firm and clear agenda to tackle the issues. It believes that providers need to embrace an Average Revenue Per MegaByte (ARMB) paradigm, where the main focus lies on raising the profitability per delivered MB, instead of focusing purely on the traditional ARPU model.

In the area of charging, the pre-paid charging model will continue to rule across the globe in 2009, as more users now go for pre-paid phones, with global recession making deep holes in everyone’s pockets.