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India’s business messaging market set to hit $1 billion revenue mark in 2025, ET Telecom

India’s business messaging market set to hit $1 billion revenue mark in 2025, ET Telecom


Mumbai: India’s business messaging market is set to top the $1 billion revenue mark in 2025, from around $810 million in 2024, driven by advanced channels such as WhatsApp Business and RCS (rich communication services) by Google and Apple, according to estimates by research firms.

Experts also predict price wars to continue in the Indian market among these channels that have practically become cheaper than SMSes in certain categories of messaging.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the India CPaaS (communication-platform-as-a-service) market is estimated at $1.01 billion in 2025 and to grow to $3.06 billion by 2030. As per previous estimates by Gartner, the market would reach $3.2 billion by 2028 from $1.3 billion in 2023.

The year will see three key innovations driving this growth — availability of Apple RCS in India, GenAI-driven chat and voice bots for customer communications and WhatsApp voice communications for businesses.

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“The CPaaS landscape is poised for transformative growth in 2025, driven by advancements in AI, evolving customer expectations, and the expansion of conversational technologies,” said Harsha Solanki, vice-president and general manager, Asia, at Infobip.

Interest in GenAI among Indian businesses is growing, with 30% of companies planning to invest in GenAI for personalised customer experiences and 4% already implementing these solutions, she said.

Advanced channels

OTT channels WhatsApp and RCS are set to reach a combined market of $1.6 billion and capture 50% of value share of India’s commercial messaging market by 2028, Gartner said.

This is a big change, as until a few years back enterprises would spend 85% of the CPaaS budgets on foundational services like SMS and 15% towards next-gen communications applications.

A joint report by Omdia and Infobip projects RCS alone to account for $544 million in revenue by 2029, generated from 254 million transactions in India from India. This would be 25% of the RCS revenues in Asia and Oceania.

Notably, RCS — a rich iteration of SMS — is a protocol controlled by telecom operators. This means a win-win for both Google/Apple and telecom operators which work on a revenue share model, say experts.

The trajectory is similar in the global market.

Juniper Research predicts Apple’s support to become a major growth driver of rich media traffic globally. By 2028, RCS business messages delivered by CPaaS platforms globally are expected to reach 86 billion, up from 2.5 billion in 2024.

The global CPaaS market will grow from $28 billion in 2024 to $58 billion in 2028, Juniper said.

The Voice Mode

In 2025, WhatsApp is also bringing voice calling services for businesses which will allow users to call their banks, airlines and other services providers to resolve their queries. Although there have been few challenges in pilots, experts believe OTT voice calling could be the next big shift in the tele-calling industry.

“Businesses will look to adopt omni-channel voice modes, especially with AI agents, which demand less regulatory oversight which exists on telecom calling,” said Apurv Agrawal, CEO and cofounder of Squadstack, a SaaS provider to tele-calling businesses.

“It would create huge convenience if customer queries can be resolved within the same chat and call window, that too with an AI agent. We are heading towards major transformations,” he added.

To push adoption of AI-led chats and make the channel more competitive, WhatsApp made two rounds of price cuts in 2024, making certain service communications free. Beginning April 2025, WhatsApp is also making utility messages (account updates, transaction alerts) free in response to users within the 24-hour customer service window.

  • Published On Jan 7, 2025 at 07:41 AM IST

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