Location-based services to grow in Asia-Pacific countries

Rating: mash-up, ads and where’s the nearest noodle bar?

By Annie Turner

Location-based services (LBS), which have largely remained untapped in Asia-Pacific, are expected to grow in tandem with the introduction of mash-up services and increase in mobile advertising.

A new report from Frost & Sullivan* suggests that the market across 13 Asia-Pacific economies was worth USD 291.7m in 2006. The report predict that this will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.3% between 2006 and 2009 to reach USD 447m by the end of 2009.

No surprise that Japan and South Korea are by far the most developed LBS markets accounting for nearly 92% of the total revenues in Asia-Pacific. This is largely attributable to the advanced data market in both countries and the existence of a mobile eco-system – a perfect environment for application developers and content providers.

The demand for LBS in the rest of Asia-Pacific has been inhibited by issues including privacy infringement concerns, inter-operability issues, lack of advanced GPS-enabled handsets, and to a large extent, a lack of a conducive eco-system and user interest. In most of these markets, the operators’ priority is limited to expanding their subscriber bases and driving greater data traffic by offering basic data services to obtain quicker return-on-investment and appeal to a larger target audience.

“The wider availability of GPS-enabled handsets, value-added mash-up services and intense advertising, the adoption of LBS throughout the rest of Asia-Pacific expects to increase,” says Frost & Sullivan industry manager Janice Chong.

Let’s face it, LBS has hardly blazed a trail anywhere and, ironically, will only become mainstream as an integrated part of wider services, as we predicted months ago in the Mobile Advertising and Marketing Analyst (see www.bkimedia.com) and confirmed now by F&S.

* (www.mobileandwireless.frost.com)