Asia's text messaging mania

[photopress:text_messaging.jpg,full,alignright]In Asia SMS continues to be the message medium of choice against mobile e-mail challengers. A new study from Portio Research suggests the outlook for text messaging in the Asia-Pacific region is bright.

Portio analyst John White stated there will be estimated 1.4 billion additional mobile phone users in Asia by 2012, and SMS revenue in the region will mushroom from $16 billion in 2006, up to $22.7 billion in 2012. John White added that regional SMS traffic within the same period will spike sharply from 967.7 billion in 2006 to a staggering 2,071 billion messages by 2012.

Alex Chau, senior research manager at analyst house IDC, said, ‘SMS will remain the dominant peer-to-peer messaging service in Asia-Pacific, as IM will require the user to have 'always-on' services like GPRS or 3G.’
Source: Business Week