Source: Digi-Capital
Source: Digi-Capital

Mobile phones have become a huge part of everyday life, but exactly how lucrative is it from a business point of view?

In a new 500-page report released yesterday, Digi-Capital, a consulting firm that helps companies with fundraising and mergers and acquisitions, crunched the numbers to determine exactly that.

It found that more than 20 billion-dollar companies have been minted to date, and that we can expect that number to soar based on worldwide revenue projections for the next three years. It forecasts that the mobile internet sector, comprising of a range of businesses, including consumer apps and mobile commerce, will soar by 300 percent to $700 billion in annual revenues by 2017.

Some of the entities that have already achieved 10-digit valuations include game companies, like King Entertainment and Gree; enterprise applications, like Dropbox and Evernote; and entertainment brands like Pandora and Instagram. Other recognizable names that made the top of list — with valuations exceeding $10 billion — include Uber and WhatsApp.

Digi-Capital forecasts that mCommerce will be one of the biggest beneficiaries, pulling in $516 billion by 2017, up from $133 billion last year. One of the smallest segments was “wearables,” which is currently receiving a lot of attention based on rumors that Apple will release an “iWatch” as soon as next week. Interestingly, it believes that sector will actually shrink to $11 billion in 2017 from $12 billion last year.

The largest of the sectors, mCommerce, will notably rise thanks to major markets, like Asia. Asia will make up half of the sector’s revenues in 2017, followed by North America.

Source: Digi-Capital
Source: Digi-Capital

Digi-Capital’s Managing Director Tim Merel said the research was conducted in-house based on information from partners and reliable sources. It then took the primary and secondary research to complete its quantitative analysis. Digi-Capital broke out the information in a five-part series of articles on its web site, and a summary of its report can be downloaded for free.

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