Business VoIP Services Market Growth
There is a reason that the market for business VoIP is growing at an incredibly high rate. Comparing voice over Internet protocol services to traditional phone lines will give you only the tip of the iceberg for this market. Let’s start with the stats and move into the reasons behind the trends.
The Trend Line Is Looking Up
Persistence Market Research culled statistics from 2007 to 2024, estimating that the overall business VoIP market will reach $194.5 billion by 2024. Future Market Insights predicts even larger growth for VoIP, estimating that the market will move to $204.8 billion by the year 2020. Regardless of where you look, the trend is towards massive growth, although there may be slight disagreements over the niche markets that will lead this growth.
The mainstay between the majority of reports on the industry was the reasoning behind the switch to business VoIP. Across the board, companies were moving away from traditional phone lines because voiceover Internet protocol services give more features for less money.
Studies covered statistics from top companies offering business VoIP services, including magicJack, Microsoft Skype, Facebook, Cisco (Jabber), 8×8, TATA Communications, Tencent (WeChat), Line, T- Mobile, Avaya, Google (Hangouts), Telefonica (Tu Me), Joon, Kosmaz Technologies (VoIP), IBM (Sametime), Viber Media, Apple (FaceTime), One Horizon Group, Vonage, BigAnt, Kakao Japan, InPhonex, Nextiva, RingCentral, HipChat, Talk360 and Vyke Telecoms, among many others.
The Asia Pacific Market and Business VoIP
Led by the burgeoning economies of China, India, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia, the Asia Pacific is featured across many of the aforementioned business VoIP studies as the location for the most growth. The key in this location will be the uptick in the number of mobile consumers in the region. Although the AMER (North, Central and South America) and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) regions are improving in this area, APAC (the Asia-Pacific) currently has more than 50% of the world’s digital population.
The market for digital communications within APAC grew 8% in 2018. Just over 70% of the Internet users in the region will make use of a smartphone. By the year 2021, mobile phone penetration will grow to 62.4%. This growth is influenced by the extremely high improvement in Internet coverage options as well as the lowered costs of owning digital devices. The region is also the world leader in digital ad spend, with 34% of ads coming from APAC. The “Advertising Expenditure for Forecasts” report from Zenith claims that this number will grow to 33.8% by the year 2020. India also recently became the second largest digital population in the world, recently surpassing the US. China is the number one digital population in the world.
China is the largest growth region within the region. The country currently has 40.7% of APACs potential business VoIP audience, with growth driven by rural consumers gaining access to smartphones for the first time. By the year 2021, there will be 1.81 billion potential digital users in the APAC region alone.
Consumers in the Asia-Pacific region are also becoming more savvy because of the proliferation of communications devices and processes. Smart phone users in India say that they make better decisions with digital technology at a 96% clip. Thailand and Vietnam report 97% of smartphone users giving them the ability to make more informed decisions on purchases. In contrast, less than 60% of consumers in the United States feel this way.
People in the Asia-Pacific region are actually using their smart phones more than in the United States. No matter whose stats you consider, by 2020, the majority of the first world countries in the Asia-Pacific region will have a higher digital incorporation rate than the United States.
Mobile Advertising Over TV?
Business VoIP will also receive a boost because of the proliferation of mobile advertising over television in the next few years. Mobile advertising will be over 30% of advertising spend across the world by 2020. This outpaces desktop advertising by a factor of two and is a 19.2% increase over the expenditures of 2017. The CAGR of mobile advertising stands at around 21%, which is poised to comfortably overtake TV advertising by 2021.
Companies switching their budgets to mobile advertising will need the ability to communicate with each other quickly as competition increases in this space. Businesses that are still conducting transactions over traditional phone lines will quickly find that they do not have the speed or the mobility to keep up with companies that are moving into business VoIP.
The international reach of business through the Internet will also break down many of the geographic barriers between countries as time moves on. Campaigns will be more localized, but they will also be scaled to entire global regions rather than countries. An example of this kind of advertising within the enterprise business market is Netflix, but it does not end there. Countless numbers of Betsy businesses and small brands are finding their audiences to be cross-sections of like-minded people between geographic locations rather than large groups of individuals within traditional geographic nodes.
The technologies that allow businesses to easily communicate between these global locations are all easily integrated into business VoIP technology – automated transcreation, machine learning, AI driven data collection and localized customer service, just to name a few. The ability to easily transfer communications between individual devices is also a boon to the growth of business VoIP. As deals are made more quickly, it will become an essential part of business to be able to continue conversations while traveling between major communications hubs.
Mobile advertising also means the transference of more information in less time when compared to TV advertising. The amount of data that is transferred between the business supply chain for these advertisements must similarly increase. This can only be done through business VoIP services that include the ability to expand the amount of data that is sent over any specific time point. Voiceover Internet protocol allows companies to include documents, video and many other types of data besides the grainy voice calls of traditional land lines.
Lowering Costs for Small Businesses
The majority of business growth is in the SMB sector. This is true even as the enterprise sector of business still retains control most of the resources, both actual and virtual. The low cost of digital communications gives small businesses around the world the ability to connect with consumers anywhere at a low cost – a cost that is not prohibitive even to micro businesses and startups.
Small businesses switching to business VoIP are estimated to save between 30 and 45% almost immediately if they move away from TDM. This is an especially attractive statistic to companies that rely on virtual workforces, which is a growing contingent of businesses around the world. A study from the virtual workforce site Upwork found that 63% of surveyed companies have invested in remote workers of some kind. Workers who do not have to worry about management looking over their shoulder are actually more productive rather than less productive, as a wealth of studies have found. None of this virtualization is possible without a robust business VoIP system that allows for agile communications between the central hub of the company and its labor force.
55% of hiring managers in the Upwork study agree that virtual workers will only proliferate in the future. They expect to transfer many of their traditional workers into remote work positions – up to 38% of them. These companies are also embracing a BYOD (bring your own device) policy, meaning that you have little chance of getting hired or maintaining a job without your own communications device. This device is certainly going to be integrated into a digital system, as they cannot connect to a traditional phone line as easily.
Small businesses also have the ability to easily scale their communications without overpaying for services when using business VoIP. Micro businesses and startups can begin with free services that can eventually graduate into more robust systems whenever sales began to take off. Just the fact that companies are saving money on communications may allow them to put more investment into R&D, operations and marketing, improving their chances of success.
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