The international Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has launched a ‘local council’ in the Philippines, in partnership with the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines (IMMAP).

The local council brings together 24 founding member companies, all driving adoption of global guidelines and best practices within the mobile marketing ecosystem – and is the second council to be launched in the Asia Pacific region in the last four months, after India.

The mobile industry is seeing great success in the Philippines. As of July 2009, the number of mobile phone SIM cards in the Philippines was estimated at close to 70 million. It was one of the first countries to publicise SMS remittance and SMS credit transfer services, which operators across the world have since tried to emulate. The Philippines also remains the SMS capital of the world with more than one billion SMS messages sent each day and revenues from text messaging on par with those from voice services.

Rohit Dadwal, managing director – Asia Pacific, MMA, said: “The Philippines market has a high mobile penetration rate and strong usage coupled with the planned deployment of 3.5G networks by local operators.

“The MMA believes that revenues allocated to mobile marketing in the Philippines will grow faster than Internet marketing in the next 12 to 24 months.”