A report from Berg Insight reveals that global IoT connectivity revenues surged by 16 percent, reaching €12.4 billion in 2023.
The advancement of the industry is driving a shift towards enhanced reliability, security, and support for international deployments, creating new market dynamics for cellular IoT connectivity providers.
By 2028, Berg Insight projects 6.0 billion IoT devices will be connected to cellular networks worldwide, generating annual connectivity revenues of €21.0 billion.
The report highlights that the top ten mobile operators reported a combined active base of 2.9 billion cellular IoT connections at the end of 2023, making up 88 percent of the total 3.3 billion connections.
China Mobile leads as the world’s largest provider of cellular IoT connectivity services with 1.32 billion connections.
China Telecom and China Unicom rank second and third with 527 million and 494 million connections, respectively.
Vodafone leads Western operators and ranks fourth overall with 184 million connections, followed by AT&T with 128 million.
Deutsche Telekom and Verizon each have between 50–57 million connections.
Telefonica, KDDI, and Orange round out the top ten with approximately 41 million, 40 million, and 37 million connections, respectively.
Growth among the largest mobile operators ranged from a 1 percent decrease to a 31 percent increase year-on-year.
China is the world’s largest market for cellular IoT connectivity services by volume. The IoT installed base in China grew by 26 percent to 2.3 billion IoT connections at the end of 2023. This represents about 71 percent of the global IoT installed base.
North America and Western Europe are the second and third largest markets for IoT solutions with 262 million and 257 million IoT connections respectively at the end of 2023.
Latin America, South Asia and Central & Eastern Europe had 62–80 million IoT connections, while Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia had between 41–34 million. Australia & Oceania was the smallest region with approximately 15 million IoT connections.
IoT managed service providers are pivotal in the ecosystem, often operating as full MVNOs and offering IoT connectivity services based on a combination of roaming and local access agreements. Notable providers include 1GLOBAL, 1NCE, Aeris, BICS, Cubic Telecom, emnify, Eseye, floLIVE, KORE, Soracom, Tata Communications, Telit Cinterion, Velos IoT, and Wireless Logic. These providers managed over 200 million cellular IoT connections at the end of 2023, generating around €1.7 billion in annual revenues.
International connectivity is one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of the cellular IoT market. Mobile operators with regional and multi-regional operations are well-positioned to offer competitive IoT connectivity services for international deployments, leveraging their network footprints and favorable roaming agreements.
However, the priorities of many mobile operators and their IoT businesses are increasingly misaligned, as the telecom industry trends towards consolidating operations in key markets and integrating fixed and mobile network operations. This has led to greater separation between mobile operators’ IoT businesses and network operations, resulting in more open approaches to global network access in line with the strategies of IoT managed service providers.
Established IoT managed service providers often have more advanced localization capabilities through IMSI and eSIM profile donor agreements. Berg Insight predicts this separation will continue, driven by changing industry dynamics and the shift to new eSIM technologies, advocating for global consolidation of cellular IoT connectivity platforms.
