Market soars year on year to Q1 2010, says Acision study.
Acision's Mobile Value-Added Service Monitor reveals that VAS revenues in Brazil have reached R$ 2.4 billion, and says they represent 14.8 per cent of Brazilian operator’s gross revenues – an uplift from 11.5 per cent from the first quarter of 2009.
It concludes that social media is driving much of the growth, with networks such as Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn and Twitter especially popular among Brazilians.
The report revealed that 69 per cent of interviewees access social networking sites on a regular basis – and that 13 per cent of smartphone users do so.
Meanwhile SMS continues to be the top mobile VAS in Brazil with 79 per cent of respondents claiming to have used the service in the first quarter of 2010.
The average recoded rate of sent text messages went from 23 SMS per phone in February 2010 to 26 text messages per mobile phone in April 2010.
As for the average unitary cost of an SMS, it fell in that same period, from R$ 0.24 to R$ 0.13.
"The growth of social networking is very impressive...the trend can be emulated via mobile phones if the operators provide easy, affordable access to mobile broadband," said Rafael Steinhauser, Acision’s president for Latin America.
Other report highlights:
* Smartphone users are the most likely to use handsets for Internet access (14 per cent), against 4 per cent for other devices.
* Only 3 per cent sent or received e-mails, 7 per cent have used IM and 3 per cent have mobile broadband
* 59 per cent of mobile phone users have listened to music on their mobile in the last three months at an average of 3.6 times per week.
( After music, the most accessed mobile entertainment services are games (40%), videos (5%) and open TV (2%).
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