Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Gartner is cautious

Gartner produced research indicating that mobile payment subscribers will increase from 33 million to 104 million subscribers in the next three years. This is quite conservative compared to some of the other recent results (see my blogs on this here and here) that were produced by other research companies. Especially their estimate of (only) 500 thousand mobile payment subscribers in Europe at the moment. I think companies like paybox in Austria would be surprised that they have more subscribers in Austria than those that Gartner counted in Europe... wait a minute, last I checked Austria was in Europe. Also the fact that they did not count African subscribers - does that mean that they do not know about the massive penetration of mobile payment subscribers in Africa (my estimate between 7 and 12 million), or that Africa does not exist?

I still remember a previous estimate that Gartner got terribly wrong: the "75% probability that 60% of companies were not ready for Y2K" predication. After all the angst that they produced during 1999, maybe policy now is that they should play everything down?

No comments: