One in every eight mobile users worldwide will either have a ticket delivered to their mobile phone or buy a ticket with their phone by 2015, according to a new study from Juniper Research.

About one in 20 mobile users worldwide currently use ticket delivery to their phones — roughly 230 million people according to Juniper. This figure will jump to 750m people in the next four years, with tickets delivered by near field communication technology, as well as by SMS, bar codes, mobile web and smartphone apps.

The analyst firm’s Mobile Ticketing Markets report sees opportunities for mobile ticketing spreading right across the transport, sport, entertainment and events sectors, and pinpointed the next two years to 2013 as the key period in which mobile ticketing will grow in popularity.

“Mobile technology is moving the ticket machine into our pockets,” says author Howard Wilcox. “Our research demonstrated that mobile ticketing will change the way that many people buy and obtain their regular, everyday tickets that are mostly printed at the moment.

“We foresee strong acceptance driven not only by airlines but also cinemas and some sports events: Bar-coded boarding passes are a clear case in point.”

The report also predicts mobile ticketing being used by one in five users by 2015 in more highly developed regions such as Japan, central and eastern Europe and Scandinavia. It does though identify existing ticket infrastructure and poor user experience as barriers to growth.

Last year, Juniper Research predicted that nearly 15bn tickets would be delivered to subscribers’ mobile devices worldwide by 2014, compared to just over two billion in 2011, while in November it said one in six mobile devices would be NFC-enabled by the same year.

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