Analyst Informa Telecoms & Media has predicted a tough year ahead for the mobile handset industry, particularly in developed markets like Western Europe and North America.

The company's latest research claims that the global mobile subscription market grew by 18.5 per cent in 2008, and that this growth will fall to 12.7 per cent in 2009.

That's still growth though, right? Well, not if you're in those developed markets. Informa reckons the Western European total device market will shrink by 13 per cent in 2009, thanks to consumers not upgrading their phones as often.

"The handset market is facing a difficult period with the average replacement cycle likely to increase by 6-8 months in 2009, which would result in a 5 per cent year-on-year decline in the number of total devices sold globally to 1.16 billion", says senior forecasting analyst Nidhir Maudgalya (pictured).

"And things could get even worse than this, as depending on the extent of the deterioration of global macroeconomic conditions, the year-on-year fall in the number of total devices sold could double to 10 per cent with replacement cycles increasing to up to 12 months."

This is a problem for the mobile games industry, which has traditionally generated a large chunk of its revenues when people upgrade their phones and look for content to download to them.

However, there's some hope for games publishers targeting emerging markets like India and China, with the former becoming the world's largest market in terms of net mobile subscriber additions in 2008 - 102 million new subscribers.