Wireless Games Revenue to Grow Ten-fold

Downloadable games will replace ringtones as the service that drives Western Europe's growth in mobile content and entertainment service revenue over the next three years, according to a new report released this week by Analysys, the global advisers on telecoms and new media.

Inset is Katrina Bond Principal Analyst at Analysy.

The report, Mobile Content and Entertainment Services: forecasting the market for games and other wireless content, concludes that among mobile content and entertainment services, mobile games offer the greatest prospects in the short term. Analysys forecasts a more than tenfold increase
in mobile service revenue from games, from EUR255 million in 2002 to over
EUR3 billion in 2005. (Chart available to journalists on request.)

"Ringtones, logos and other personalisation services have formed the
backbone of mobile content and entertainment services to date, with an
estimated market value of EUR1.2 billion across Western Europe in 2002,"
notes principal analyst Katrina Bond, author of the report. "But growth in
the personalisation market is slowing rapidly, while downloadable games, a
logical extension of personalisation services, are just taking off."

Most mobile games today are either embedded in the handset, like the 'Snake'
game on Nokia handsets, or are simple text-based games, such as quizzes like
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. Operators across Western Europe are now
introducing arcade-type games that can be downloaded to mobile handsets. O2
UK, for example, offers a range of Atari games for EUR2.50 per download,
with each game having a lifespan of one month.

The introduction of mobile handsets such as the Nokia 7650 and 7210, Samsung
S100 and the Sony Ericsson T68i, which have colour screens and Java
capabilities, enable graphical games and other rich content to be downloaded
to phones. Such handsets have only been launched in Western Europe during
the past six months, but are expected to penetrate the market quickly, with
60% of all handsets in circulation in Western Europe being Java-enabled by
the end of 2005.

In Japan, NTT DoCoMo launched its Java-based games and information services
in January 2001, and by the end of October 2002, 43% of its 35.2 million
i-mode subscribers were also using the service.

Other services that will contribute to the growth in mobile content and
entertainment services over the next few years include content messaging
based on recently launched multimedia messaging services (MMS) and
cross-media services such as submitting votes to TV programmes or radio
stations.

The report points out that several factors must come together to enable the
potential growth in the market for mobile content and entertainment services
- which Analysys forecasts could give rise to a market size of EUR11
billion in 2005 (from just over EUR2 billion in 2002) - to be realised.

Two of the biggest factors currently constraining growth are lack of
interoperability, and the absense of a common standard for digital rights
management (DRM). Operators have been launching MMS for picture messaging
across Western Europe over the past six months, but there is still no
guarantee that customers will be able to send messages to their friends who
use other networks. "Most MMS interoperability and interworking issues are
likely to be sorted out during the first quarter of 2003," says Bond, "but
DRM issues are going to take longer to resolve."

Contractual and technical solutions are required to ensure that downloaded
content cannot be freely distributed, otherwise intellectual property will
not be protected and operators and content owners will miss out on valuable
revenue streams. In the absense of common standards for DRM, some content
providers have taken a gamble that the benefits of viral marketing will
outweigh the lost revenue associated with having their content freely
distributed. But owners of the most valuable content brands have slowed
their entry into the mobile market, or have restricted the distribution of
their content to handsets that do not allow content to be forwarded to other
users.

The report analyses the factors that will determine the rate of growth in
the mobile content market, presenting estimates of market size for 2002 and
forecasts through to 2008. The detailed forecasts cover France, Germany,
Italy, Sweden and the UK, as well as Western Europe as a whole, and are
broken down by market segment and technology generation.

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TTP Communications announces that TCL mobile Communication Ltd, China's largest manufacturer of mobile phones, has licensed TTPCom's GPRS (2.5G) platform.

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DoOnGo Technologies announced that Matsushita Communication Industrial will license the popular Mobile Intelligence(TM) to be featured on Panasonic's new phones.

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EuroTel Bratislava announced that the second installment of the UMTS license fee in the amount of Sk 999 million was paid in full to the Telecommunications Office of the Slovak Republic

Airvana Inc and Winphoria Networks Inc will demonstrate push-to-talk applications over a live CDMA2000 1xEV-DO network and interoperability with 1xRTT networks

QUALCOMM Incorporated announced that the Company will be exhibiting and demonstrating its industry-leading wireless solutions at 2002 CDMA Americas Congress

Ericsson and Hutchison have signed a seven-year agreement to implement an innovative services business model that will deliver increased efficiency and significant cost savings.

Telstra launched Australia’s first fully operational third generation (3G) mobile service for business customers, which is faster, more powerful and feature rich than anything they would have experienced before.

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