While Location Based Services (LBS) revenues may be centered in the United States at the moment, accounting for 81% of global revenues in the last year, a new report from ABI Research forecasts a big change in the LBS landscape over the next 5 years. The report states that location-based services in the United States will only account for 32% of global revenues by 2013, while Europe’s contribution will jump from 5% to 31% and Asia’s revenue contribution will move from 11% to 27%.
So why exactly does North America rule the location-based services field at the moment? According to IntoMobile, the research report says the reason is this:
LBS’s slow uptake outside North America has had everything to do with the fact that unlike the CDMA phones so prevalent there, which have utilized GPS to comply with the United States’ E911 regulatory mandate, the GSM handsets owned by most users in Europe and Asia have not generally offered native GPS support. However with the broader proliferation of GPS-enabled GSM handsets in those other regions, and with the quickening rollout of 3G services worldwide, the opportunities for LBS service offerings will grow quickly.
ABI analyst Dominique Bonte also states that most developers these days write applications that work on all platforms, carriers, and mobile devices and prices are pretty well ubiquitous across the globe. However, in some regions people tend to prefer, for example, friend-finding apps over pure GPS navigation. GPS functionality tends to be a more expensive, explaining some of the recent differences in revenues across different regions.
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