Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan claims that the market for mobile content in Latin America was worth $1.15 billion last year, and will increase to $8.93 billion by 2014.

Its new Latin American Mobile Content Markets report also claims that by the end of 2007, there were 57.1 million mobile content users in Latin America, representing 31.1 per cent of total mobile users.

Ringtones are still driving the market, but here's the thing for PocketGamer.biz readers: games is one of the areas predicted for rapid growth in the years to come, although Frost & Sullivan isn't publicly putting a figure on that.

Brazil and Mexico are generating the vast majority of overall mobile content revenues, it seems - $1.11 billion out of that $1.15 billion.

It's not so long since most mobile games publishers worked through aggregators in Latin America, rather than go direct to operators and portals in the region.

However, the strong growth in games sales means that many have now established local offices, certainly in the largest Latin American markets. That's not to say there aren't still technical barriers though.

"The Latin American mobile content market is still limited by the fact that not all the mobile handsets are capable of running all mobile content services, especially games and videos," says F&S analyst Andrés Sciarrotta.

"The impact of this restraint is, however, expected to diminish once handsets become more affordable and accessible, enlarging the addressable market size."