Smartphones, Enterprise IoT and Wearables poised to be major volume drivers for eSIM adoption.
Shipments of eSIM-based devices will reach almost two billion units by 2025, up from 364 million in 2018, according to the latest research report from Counterpoint’s ETO (Emerging Technology Opportunities) Service.
This will be mainly due to smartphones and enterprise IoT devices. Our findings also show that most eSIM-based devices will have a hardware chip based eSIM solution until 2025, and after that, we will see a rise in the adoption of integrated SIM-based solutions.
Commenting on the market demand for eSIMs, Counterpoint Research Analyst, Satyajit Sinha, noted:
“The growth of eSIMs will revolutionize how the connectivity across the devices will be activated and managed. Its compact form factor offers significant space reduction along with potentially higher security, re-programmability, and power efficiencies. For operators, eSIMs can significantly reduce SIM distribution and activation costs with the potential to generate higher roaming revenues.”
Sinha added:
“Currently, the majority of the eSIM deployments have been proprietary Soft SIM solutions. However, hardware-based eSIMs are gaining traction, thanks to Apple, automotive OEMs, and wearables. The leading suppliers of hardware-based eSIMs include Infineon, ST Micro, Gemalto, G+D, Workz, and others. RedteaMobile, Truphone, Telna, ARM, roam2free, and others are leading suppliers for proprietary Soft SIM-based eSIM solutions.”
Commenting on the segments adopting eSIM, Research Director, Neil Shah added:
“Automotive and enterprise IoT devices will continue to remain high on the eSIM adoption curve in future. Further, the eSIM activation rate in cellular enterprise IoT devices will also be much higher than consumer IoT devices.”
“Key drivers being fragmented deployments, module space savings, robust tamper-proof security, flexibility in choosing the best available cellular network seamlessly, and significant savings on physical provisioning, and maintenance costs.”
Adoption of eSIMs in smartphones should also drive the major volume growth with the adoption of eSIM by top players such as Apple, Google. Other connected devices such as mobile hotspots, routers, connected PCs, drones, and smartwatches though will grow at a higher CAGR due to a relatively smaller base of adoption right now. However, in terms of shipment volumes, smartphones and B2B IoT devices will lead.
