The transition of digital ecosystem to metaverse, where a person will feel immersed in a virtual world, will push data usage by 20 times across the globe by 2032.
The report said metaverse has enormous potential to further expand screen time and drive more bandwidth consumption and telecom operators Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio are suitably placed to benefit from the surge in India, Credit Suisse said.
“Internet traffic is already 80 per cent video and has been growing at a 30 per cent CAGR (compound annual growth rate). Our team projects that even modest metaverse usage could drive a further 37 per cent CAGR in the next decade to 20x current data usage,” the report said.
Augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are expected to see a boom as these are the technologies that are required for accessing the metaverse.
According to the report, while 5G will support the metaverse ecosystem, the emergence of 6G will enhance metaverse use cases.
It said the gaming segment is one of the segments where early use cases of metaverse are expected.
The report mentioned that gaming is at an early stage in India and mobile gaming is being driven by mobile phones due to the emergence of affordable smartphones and 4G data services.
“Mobile internet remains the key medium for Indian users to go online, given relatively low fixed broadband penetration. The share of mobile gaming in online games is expected to increase in future,” the report said.
The report added that India is one of the leading countries in the world in terms of number of hours spent on mobile per day but it has low penetration of fixed broadband compared to global peers, which will be key to realise the full potential of metaverse.
“While it is too early to determine the impact of metaverse on Indian telcos’ revenues, we believe Bharti Airtel (with 17 per cent of revenues from fixed line) and Jio are well placed to benefit from surge in data usage driven by metaverse in the latter half of this decade,” the report said.
Tencent and NetEase stand out in the global race to the metaverse as large users and early bets on games bode well, Credit Suisse says metaverse data
Tencent Holdings and NetEase will stand out in the race to the metaverse, as their large population of users and early investments in related infrastructure bode well for new businesses stemming from the web’s transformation into an immersive, three-dimensional online world, Credit Suisse said.
China’s top internet and games publishers are among a list of 35 global stock picks identified in the Metaverse: a guide to the next gen internet report released this week by Credit Suisse. A relatively new frontier for the web, the metaverse ecosystem is made up of five components including infrastructure, hardware, content, platform, and payment mechanism, it said.
While Chinese tech companies are still catching up on metaverse compared to their US counterparts, Tencent and NetEase have already made some headways in hosting virtual events and activities.
These avatar-based concerts and conferences, hosted on virtual events platforms such as NetEase’s Yaotai, even presented the Hong Kong stock exchange listing ceremony of its own music streaming unit NetEase Cloud Village last November. Tencent Music hosted its own music festival “Tmeland” where participants, all represented by avatars, interacted with each other.
Popular NFT games based on the “play-to-earn” model, such as Axie Infinity, the popular blockchain-based game which allows players to earn tokens and trade in-game assets in real world digital exchanges, will be likely to face big challenges in China, Credit Suisse analysts said.
Still, Chinese companies such as Tencent and NetEase are increasingly investing into metaverse games. Tencent has published LuoBuLeSi, which is a China version of Roblox, an online game platform which lets users operate a virtual avatar and play games built by other users.
NetEase, China’s second-largest publisher of online games after Tencent, has also invested in the metaverse social network IMVU, and some sandbox games such as Minecraft. China is the world’s largest online game market with 666 million gamers.
