Our opportunity
Anite has two market-facing divisions, Wireless and Travel. Wireless has two distinct businesses: Handset Testing, which provides specialist systems, hardware and software to enable manufacturers to design new chipsets, devices and data cards effectively and to bring them to the market quickly; and Network Testing provides the technology that enables Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), to test the efficiency and effectiveness of their mobile phone networks – and to ensure a consistently high-quality service for users of mobile devices – by carrying out live testing with different makes of devices.
Wireless market
The Wireless market continues to grow rapidly. In less than 40 years – the first call was made on a portable cellular phone in April 1973 – the number of active mobile connections has grown to five billion. It is estimated that 1.55 billion phones will be sold in 2011, up 16.1% on 2010(i), and the total number of subscribers will increase from 5.4 billion in 2010 to 7.6 billion in 2015(ii). Sales of smartphones are expected to grow 61% year-on-year (i) – making the market ever more complex. While there is little growth in voice and text in developed markets, mobile data traffic is expected to grow by 6.3 exabytes (1 billion gigabytes) a month by 2015, a 25-fold increase over 2010(iii).
While this increase in traffic is to be expected in developing countries, such as India, where there are few or no fixed-line networks and most access to the internet is made on wireless networks, even in developed economies people are increasingly using their mobile devices to access data, rather than fixed-line phones or desk-top computers.
In time, we expect manufacturers to reduce the number of different models they produce, but advances in technology will always result in new models and devices, which will need to be tested and verified.
While LTE (4G) is being adopted far more quickly than 3G was, the speed of adoption is being influenced by a number of factors: spectrum allocation from governments; the legacy technology on networks; and the economic pressures of the past two years, which have constrained the level of investment needed to achieve the necessary upgrades in infrastructure. Although we do not expect LTE to be implemented in the UK until 2013/14, it is already in the process of being adopted in the US, Japan, China and some mainland European countries. At this early point in the development of the LTE market we estimate that less than 40% of Handset Testing customers are developing LTE products. However this number is growing.
Sources: (i) CCS Insight; (ii) 4G Americas; (iii)Cisco Visual Networking Index, 2011
Travel market
Consolidation in the leisure travel industry has resulted in the large companies becoming even larger, so that fewer companies are managing greater volumes of business. Their IT systems – which have the potential to improve profitability by making buying, selling and back-office functions more economical – have, however, generally failed to keep pace. In addition, particularly in the UK and the Nordic region, traditional tour operators face increasing competition from internet travel companies.
Our industry-leading reservation and e-business system is scaleable and is, therefore, particularly suitable for large businesses. It has achieved considerable success with Europe’s leading leisure travel business, TUI, and has the potential to achieve the same increases in efficiency and profitability for many others – including tour operators, specialist holiday companies, leisure park operators, accommodation providers, and cruise and ferry operators.
