[Satellite News 11-08-12] While developing markets continue to emerge with new opportunities for satellite, the pace of change is appearing in teleport operator business results at a slow pace, according to the World Teleport Association’s (WTA) independent Insider the Top Operators of 2011 report published earlier this week.
   The report was developed under the direction of WTA’s Research Committee led by Newtec CEO Serge van Herck. WTA Executive Director Robert Bell developed the research methodology, analyzed the data and authored the report.
   When the WTA survey asked respondents to indicate how much of their revenue came from different regions in the past year, a 31 percent majority said their revenues came from Europe and the Middle East, followed by North America and the Caribbean at 22 percent. The Asian and African regions followed each with a 16 percent revenue share.
   The percentages, WTA noted, changed only slightly from 2010, with Europe and the Middle East gaining a few percentage points and Asia losing a few percentage points. The data seems to suggest that the developing satellite and teleport market boom may be waiting for some momentum. Though the numbers were essentially unchanged based on the entire Top Operators group of 2010-2011 or comparison of same-company statistics, report author Bell urges market watchers not to read too much into a single year’s changes.
   “The media-focused results are consistent, however, with a recessionary environment in major markets for media-focused companies,” Bell wrote in the report. “Program origination is the most complex, high-value and high-priced service offered by teleport operators, and it appeared to suffer a small decline as a share of same-company revenues. More basic backhaul for video and audio took up the slack, and media-focused companies also expanded their business in non-core government, military and enterprise markets.”
   When WTA asked operators to report on the percentage of revenue that each of their applications contributed in 2011, the response was that the top two applications were program origination for distribution and video/audio backhaul for contribution, illustrating the continued dominance of satellite’s broadcasting segment. According to the WTA study, media-focused companies generated an average of 33 percent of their revenues from program origination and 24 percent from video/audio backhaul.
   “Compared to 2012, most changes from year-to-year were nominal, but non-broadcast content distribution, program origination and both long-haul and local terrestrial transmission posted increases to a meaningful degree,” said Bell. “The top-ranking applications change from year to year, depending on the mix of companies in the Top Operators. Few, if any, teleport operators actually deliver all of these applications to customers. Breaking down the responses to the 2011 survey by media focused and non-media-focused operators yields the results shown on the next page.”  
   The next three of the top five applications were provided to the enterprise, government and military market segments. Non-media-focused companies, by contrast, produced 24 percent of their revenues from enterprise networks, with 18 percent from military applications and 15 percent from Internet backhaul and voice-over-IP.
   Analysts at TechNavio issued their own report Nov. 8 that focused purely on the growth potential of global FSS satellite operators. The “Global Fixed Satellite Service Market 2011-2015” report predicts the FSS market to grow at a CAGR of 5.1 percent by 2015.
   “One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the increasing demand for TV and video transponders,” TechNavio wrote in the report. “The Global FSS market has also been witnessing the increasing offerings of value-enhanced services by FSS operators. However, the requirement of high CAPEX investment could pose a challenge to the growth of this market … Key vendors dominating this space include Intelsat, SES, Eutelsat Communications and Telesat Holdings.”
   TechNavio said it prepared the report based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. “The report covers the Americas, the EMEA and the APAC regions; it also covers the Global FSS market landscape and its growth prospects in the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market,” the firm said.