Social messaging to decimate carrier revenues

The rise of social messaging smartphone apps such as Apple’s iMessage and the popular Whatsapp will gut international carrier SMS revenues over the next five years, a new report has found.

According to research firm Ovum, globally carriers will have lost $US23 billion ($A22.4) in SMS revenue by the end of this year, skyrocketing to $US54 billion in 2016.

Ovum telecoms analyst Neha Daria urged carriers to develop new messaging products to stem the SMS-related losses.

But she noted that the uptake of social messaging hadn't been as dramatic in Australia as in other parts of the world.

“It will take at least a year, if not longer, for social messaging to reach the same levels in Australia as in other parts of Asia-Pacific,” Daria told iTnews.

Daria observed that Australian SMS pricing had been generally favourable to consumers.

Telstra chief executive officer David Thodey told investors in August that it had been "pretty good at managing [the] transition" from SMS.

For the financial year ending June 30, the telco giant reported a 21.6 percent increase in the number of texts sent by its customers, equating to over 12 billion individual messages.

This rise was on the back of a 5.7 percent increase in the number of Telstra retail mobile customers.

"There's quite a bit of change around the world as people are moving to data plans and how you manage that in terms of the structure of your plans," Thodey said.

"Luckily we've been pretty good at managing that transition. Remember SMS declines globally - we've not seen that because we always had included SMS."