Market research firm Informa (News - Alert) Telecoms & Media has predicted that emerging markets will be the key driver in the growth of global mobile value-added-service "VAS" revenues from $200 billion in 2009 to $340 billion in 2014.

With high market saturation and limited growth prospects in developed countries, the emerging markets with a high growth potential are becoming a key focus for mobile industry players including operators, handset manufacturers and infrastructure vendors, as well as the VAS platform and technology vendors.

Shailendra Pandey, a senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media (News - Alert), commented: "Compared to the developed world, there are very different economic, social, demographic and cultural challenges in the emerging markets. In many countries, 3G services are still not available, or are limited to mobile subscribers in larger cities. Therefore operators have to depend on 2G services such as SMS, USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, to be able to drive mass market adoption of their mobile value-added-services, and to successfully reach subscribers in smaller towns and rural areas."

Emerging markets such as China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Russia, Poland and the Ukraine are expected to account for 36 per cent of the global mobile data revenues in 2014.

Mobile operators and service providers in emerging markets have been more innovative and proactive in developing and deploying new mobile VAS than their counterparts in the developed world. In particular, operators are seeing strong uptake of utility type services including mobile payments, P2P funds transfer and agricultural information services.

According to the research firm, services impact day-to-day lives of the local population and contribute to the social and economic development of people in these markets. Services such as M-PESA from Safaricom in Kenya, the Rural Information Service from China Mobile, the "Please Call Me" service from MTN (News - Alert) in South Africa, and the "CellBazaar" service from GrameenPhone in Bangladesh are some good examples.

Mobile social networking is beginning to see strong growth in emerging markets but most of the services are instant messaging chat applications. One of the most successful service examples is China Mobile's (News - Alert) IM service called Fetion, which has over 100 million registered users. The addressable market for the Fetion service is large as it can work using IVR, GPRS and SMS access modes.

Mobile app stores have so far not received the same attention from the operators in emerging markets as they have in the US and Western Europe. However, some large operators like China Mobile have already launched - or are considering launching - their own app stores.