Home » News » DAS » Of all mobile accessories, memory cards deliver most revenue

Of all mobile accessories, memory cards deliver most revenue

 

Of all mobile accessories, memory cards deliver most revenue

By Victor Ng | Dec 12, 2008

Thumbnail: 

Although cellular handset accessories such as chargers and batteries ship far more units in what is today a US$58 billion industry, memory cards provide the greatest revenue of all mobile phone add-ons, according to a new study from ABI Research.

Driven by the photo, audio and video demands of media-centric handsets and smartphones, these memory cards - largely from third-party suppliers such as SanDisk - will see a 17% compound annual growth rate in shipments over the years to 2013.

However, says industry analyst Michael Morgan, it's not just about units shipped. "Of all accessories, memory cards deliver the best revenue return. In fact, as production has outstripped demand the market is currently oversupplied, leading to a 60% year-over-year fall in per-Megabyte prices. However, the memory capacity of the cards being sold is always increasing, and the resulting higher Megabyte volumes more than offset the decline in ASP."

Handset makers have been putting inexpensive low-capacity cards into smartphone and media phone boxes for some time. However, notes Morgan, there is currently a point of friction between handset vendors and carriers: the operators want all memory cards out of the box, preferring to sell higher-capacity cards separately.

"The challenge for mobile operators," he says, "is that subsidizing handset accessories means losing some of the high margins that they earn through the sales of these products. But subsidies also mean that many more subscribers will have handset accessories such as memory cards, and will be more likely to use mobile music services or download songs, leading to higher data ARPUs for operators."

The ABI Research study Mobile Phone Accessories focuses on key handset accessories and the market for these products, including in-depth analysis for both in-box as well as aftermarket handset accessories. It also examines key market drivers and barriers to growth, technological trends, and future market potential for handset accessories.

 

Orignal Author: 
Victor Ng

Add comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <a> <p> <span> <div> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <img> <img /> <map> <area> <hr> <br> <br /> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <table> <tr> <td> <em> <b> <u> <i> <strong> <font> <del> <ins> <sub> <sup> <quote> <blockquote> <pre> <address> <code> <cite> <embed> <object> <strike> <caption>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Use <!--pagebreak--> to create page breaks.

More information about formatting options

Verification Code
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Similar

Related Articles

Recent popular content

Most Read

  1. HR consultant Gemini Personnel employs data protection and disaster recovery solution from FalconStor

  2. Survey highlights growing market for and proven benefits of deduplication in production environments

  3. BYOD and ITSM: What you need to know

  4. Understanding hypervisor-based disaster recovery

  5. A little security for Big Data