Machina Research, the world’s leading provider of strategic market intelligence on the Internet of Things today published its annual guidance on the size of the IoT market opportunity worldwide.
The key findings are as follows:
- The total number of IoT connections will grow from 6 billion in 2015 to 27 billion in 2025, a CAGR of 16%.
- Today 71% of all IoT connections are connected using a short range technology (e.g. WiFi, Zigbee, or in-building PLC), by 2025 that will have grown slightly to 72%. The big short-range applications, which cause it to be the dominant technology category, are Consumer Electronics, Building Security and Building Automation.
- Cellular connections will grow from 334 million at the end of 2015 to 2.2 billion by 2025, of which the majority will be LTE. 45% of those cellular connections will be in the ‘Connected Car’ sector, including both factory-fit embedded connections and aftermarket devices.
- 11% of connections in 2025 will use Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) connections such as Sigfox, LoRa and LTE-NB1.
- China and the US will be neck-and-neck for dominance of the global market by 2025. China which will account for 21% of global IoT connections, ahead of the US on 20, with similar proportions for cellular connections. However, the US wins in terms of IoT revenue (22% vs 19%). Third largest market is Japan with 7% of all connections, 7% of cellular and 6% of global revenue.
- The total IoT revenue opportunity will be USD3 trillion in 2025 (up from USD750 billion in 2015). Of this figure, USD1.3 trillion will be accounted for by revenue directly derived from end users in the form of devices, connectivity and application revenue. The remainder comes from upstream and downstream IoT-related sources such as application development, systems integration, hosting and data monetisation.
- By 2025, IoT will generate over 2 zettabytes of data, mostly generated by consumer electronics devices. However it will account for less than 1% of cellular data traffic. Cellular traffic is particularly generated by digital billboards, in-vehicle connectivity and CCTV.
Talking about the report, Machina Research CEO Matt Hatton commented:
“Through our regular ongoing work in our IoT Forecasts Research Stream we are constantly monitoring hundreds of different constituent applications across every country and adjusting our outlook for each. Every year we take a snapshot of the IoT market, pulling our latest forecasts to examine how the overall market had developed in the year.”
“This year the top line figures of 27 billion connections and USD3 trillion of revenue are eye-catching and the opportunity is substantial. However it’s not just a case of rising tides lifting all boats. To take advantage of the opportunities in IoT, suppliers need to understand the key market dynamics and their competitive environment, and develop best practice.”
“Most of what Machina Research does is focused on supporting various players understand and exploit the opportunities we outline in this study”.
