Magister: BlackBerry set to be 'pureed' in 2013
M&A specialist Magister Advisors envisages a major mobile market shake-up this year plus six other bold IT predictions
A "major mobile market shake-up" is on the cards for 2013 as Amazon comes to the fore and RIM’s BlackBerry is "pushed out of the market" by the competition.
The prediction is one of seven key trends for 2013 revealed by specialist M&A firm Magister Advisors.
Victor Basta, managing director of Magister Advisors, said: “With January’s slew of announcements and earnings reports finally complete, the changes to the industry in 2013 are already clear.”
The first prediction is that the mobile industry is no longer about the device, but instead it is going to be all about the software. According to Magister, industry commentators are stuck in a "pre-1981, pre-Microsoft hardware mindset". Real value, the market watcher claims, will be in monetising "fickle" mobile users, with mobile innovation all being software based.
“Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Samsung will flourish or wilt based on their ability to produce great software, not great devices,” the firm said.
2013 will also be the "year of Facebook" according to Magister, mainly down to its Graph Search launch which will have a "dramatic and positive impact on advertising revenues over time".
Amazon is also the dark horse of the mobile market, buoyed by its "incredible assets" such as a huge credit card-enabled user base and a proven ability to innovate with low-cost mass-market devices such as the Kindle. “Amazon can scale across any market it enters,” the firm predicted.
“The rapid uptake of its low-cost, wireless and mobile-enabled Kindle underpin our prediction that Amazon will be the next emerging force in the mobile ecosystem. We will start to see this in 2013.”
The mobile industry is set for a major shake-up according to Magister, which singled out BlackBerry as a potential loser.
“BlackBerry 10 is not a year late. It’s seven years too late. The business will eventually be pureed by the competition,” Magister claimed, adding that BB10 will deliver a resurgance but it will be entirely temporary.
“The business has been too hardware focused for too long and its market will be eaten by others,” the firm opined. Additionally, the announcement of tech IPO intentions will become a major lure for M&A stalking horses, Magister predicted.
“Most next-generation businesses are lean and have relatively little in the way of burdensome infrastructure or the relatively bloated headcounts that technology businesses had in the 80s and 90s,” the firm said. “IPO intentions, in our view, will increasingly be a ruse to smoke out potential buyers.”
This year will also see major innovation out of developing markets according to the M&A specialist. One example it gave was the redefinition of smartphones, which will see sub-$100 (£64) smartphones come out of China and other markets in greater volume, which will redefine what a smartphone actually is.
Finally, Magister predicted that ad technology will become ubiquitous across platforms and geographies, with agencies working out how to monitise performance advertising across platforms to a much greater degree.
Blender picture from Shutterstock.com