iBasis Sells Text Messaging Business: Even Rolling Up Other Carriers' Business Doesn't Pay Well Enough

In a move that shows the growing revenue difficulty in the text messaging business, iBasis, a KPN company, is selling its text messaging hubbing business to MessageBird.

Keep in mind that the whole idea for iBasis was that, with declining revenue and margin from international voice and messaging, iBasis would itself become the outsourced provider of international voice and messaging on behalf of other service providers.

Now iBasis has had to divest an asset that no longer can be profitably operated, and which is in decline.

In some ways, the divestiture comes as no surprise. KPN has been warning about falling revenue from text messaging since at least 2011.

KPN Mobile reported a 10 percent decline in SMS traffic in its youth segment in early 2011, and obviously was worried then about over the top messaging impact on text messaging revenues.

source: KPN