The Business Confidence Index is a bold experiment that the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) began at Mobile World Congress last year. The BCI is compiled from a survey that is sent out every quarter, anonymously answered by Executives at the top levels of member companies of the MEF. And so at MWC this year, I sat down for a juice and miniature doughnut with Rimma Perelmuter, Executive Director of the MEF, to talk about what the BCI has revealed over the last year.
First, a little info on the BCI:
It is designed to a tool for the industry to help navigate the future of mobile, get a look at what the trends are and get insights into the sentiments of how the industry is doing over all. It’s a series of questions about how your company feels about the future of the mobile industry. It asks questions about growth, revenue, what areas the company feels will expand, what things it feels are failing. Previous BCIs have shown a lot of confidence in continued growth, despite the recession, and confidence in mobile content. The second BCI, for example, showed that mobile entertainment executives had most confidence in social networking and games.
There was a lot of information shared in our briefing, so the easiest way to present it is this handy-dandy bullet point list:
- As more BCIs get published, the response rate keeps increasing. Since the respondents trust the actual surveyors (KPMG), the answers have been getting more granular – things like what the company headcount is, and what operating expenditure is like.
- There’s been a cool off in predicted growth over the 2 quarters – dropping from an expected growth rate of 33% to 24% for the year ahead.
- The largest growth sectors in the BCI have consistently been games and apps. Apps have risen to 21% predicted growth in terms of overall mobile content revenues for the year ahead.
- There has been a SIGNIFICANT increase in the amount of “direct to customers” revenue. That is, in mobile revenue made “off-portal”. Rimma says the MEF thinks this is we’re seeing the healthy emergence of subscription models, micro-billing, apps and the opening of walled gardens through APIs and SDKs. There has been a rise from 46% – 73% in direct to consumer revenue.
- A surprising trend has been where all of the growth in mobile entertainment is expected. Almost all of the most confident companies are in the southern hemisphere. The Middle East, Asia and Latin America is where the MEF has seen sustained growth. Whereas in North America and Western Europe there’s been a constant levelling off of both confidence and growth.
After talking about the BCI, we went on to discuss regulatory issues that are arising world wide, and what the MEF is doing to address these. There has been upheaval in the regulatory landscape all over the world. The MEF wants to be an authority, a voice promoting balanced regulation. It wants to help the industry to thrive, while ensuring that the right consumer protection is in place.
To that end, the MEF is launching a new product – The Regulator Information Service Centre (RISC) is currently in Beta, but a good few MEF members are already using it. It’s a compilation of best practices and codes of conduct, relating to mobile content in different countries across the world. It is meant as a database for understanding what you need to do in a new country when starting mobile entertainment services, including who the mobile regulators actually are and how to contact them. The MEF has found that it’s members to pass back information to them about regulatory changes. Rimma claims that because of this, the MEF has a huge level of in-house regulatory know-how – so the RISC can be the first point of contact about any regulatory issues.
