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Portland. — Facebook Incoperated’s US$19 billion purchase of mobile-messaging start-up WhatsApp Inc. is a stark reminder of how much money phone carriers are losing out on as competitors let users text and chat at no charge. Free social-messaging applications like WhatsApp cost phone providers around the world — from Vodafone Group Plc (VOD) to America Movil SAB (AMXL) and Verizon Communications Corp — US$32,5 billion in texting fees in 2013, according to research from Ovum Ltd. That figure is projected to reach US$54 billion by 2016.

As more customers have switched to smartphones with better Internet access, people are relying more on applications such as WhatsApp to communicate.

Instant-messaging services have taken off outside the US where carriers don’t throw unlimited texting into voice and data plans.
The rise of these applications has offered a cheaper source of communication, especially for correspondence between different countries, undercutting the texts that had once been a key source of income for carriers worldwide.

“The trend has been that messaging is eating away into that revenue, in some countries more than others, and that trend will continue,” Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst in Issaquah, Washington, said in an interview. “The impact of free messaging has been felt worldwide. WhatsApp has clearly been the cream of the crop.”

Representatives for Newbury, England-based Vodafone, Mexico City-based America Movil and Overland Park, Kansas-based Sprint Corp. (S) didn’t respond to requests for comment on the impact from free messaging applications. A representative for Dallas-based AT&T Inc. (T) declined to comment.

WhatsApp Growth
Facebook, the world’s largest social network, said this week that it’s buying WhatsApp in a deal that values each of its 450 million active monthly users at US$42.

Free for the first year and 99 cents annually thereafter, WhatsApp is almost always cheaper than texting, especially across national borders.

With a particularly strong following in Europe, India and Latin America, the service is rapidly displacing traditional text messaging as the preferred method for young people to stay in touch on mobile devices.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 29-year-old chief executive officer, said he expects WhatsApp to reach more than 1 billion people worldwide in the next few years.

WhatsApp, Rebtel, Viber, KakaoTalk and other services use the Internet to send data instead of a  cellular network, allowing users to send text, multimedia and voice messages for free, or close to it.

Texting Decline
As free services continue to gain in popularity, US text-messaging revenue will decline 3 percent to 4 percent this year from US$21 billion in 2013, Sharma estimated. Globally, carriers’ texting revenues will peak by 2016 and then start to drop as well, he said.

The apps have eroded such revenue for several years and were a big reason why U.S. carriers began to include unlimited SMS in many of their service plans, Roger Entner, an analyst at Dedham, Massachusetts-based Recon Analytics LLC, said in an interview. The first SMS, or short message service, text was sent over Vodafone’s network in 1992.

“The wireless carriers were very concerned that WhatsApp and others would intermediate them,” Entner said. “So the wireless carriers found the most consumer-friendly solution — they gave it away, too. And that took away the incentive to join WhatsApp.”

However, carriers in other parts of the world still charge high fees for texts, and their revenue will be affected as WhatsApp’s popularity spreads, Entner said. — Bloomberg.