Current reviews from international expertise intelligence agency ABI Analysis discover that 2024 has confirmed to be a difficult 12 months for a lot of mobile IoT module distributors.
Whereas preliminary gross sales have been accomplished, the total influence received’t be absolutely understood till April 2025 when annual reviews are finalized. It’s doable that the pessimistic outlook for 2024 might worsen additional. The market has already witnessed strategic divestitures of resource-intensive product strains and the consolidation of main gamers attributable to elevated competitors and pricing pressures.
“Additionally, a critical time-sensitive issue has emerged,” says Jamie Moss, Analysis Director, IoT {Hardware} at ABI Analysis. Moss explains, “The market is struggling in the wake of the overbuying that occurred by device OEMs in 2021 and 2022, after Covid and in the face of the chipset shortage, as manufacturers sought to secure supply chains. Any lack of a vital component would have meant an inability to produce, and an inevitable loss of sales to competitors. At the time of fulfilling pipelines and ensuring predictable turnover, if not profit margin, was more critical than ever. Throughout 2024 it was anticipated that OEM module inventory would soon be used up, but the delay in return to normal sales for vendors persisted quarter to quarter; and seems likely to carry on into 2025. Some vendors were down by as much as 50% on their cellular module line of business in 2024 versus 2023.”
The present expectation is that in 2024, 426 million items of mobile IoT modules have been shipped worldwide, producing US$5.6 billion in income, in impact an similar market worth to 2023.
The one large winner in 2024 was the market chief of the earlier 5 years, Quectel, which managed to match its full 12 months 2023 turnover already by the tip of the third quarter 2024.
Based on Moss, “Quectel has other lines of business, and although the bulk of its income does come from cellular modules, unlike most of its direct competitors, it also supplies the automotive and mobile broadband markets. Quectel’s market strategy is based on growing shipment and market share, it is not focused on profit margin, which has historically stood at an average of 3%.”
New distributors have emerged and made an impression lately, proving there are nonetheless new enterprise alternatives, however their influence on the worth of the mobile IoT module market has been minor. For instance, Chinese language vendor Unionman has been delivery tens of thousands and thousands of items yearly, however to date only for Cat-1/bis and NB-IoT, at a really low unit value, for a consummately low turnover within the tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars}, and solely in China.
Moss concludes, “The practical result of the current climate is that stalwart u-blox has decided to halt its cellular operations altogether to refocus on its other business units. But it is important to note that the IoT market is not failing, it’s the cellular module business specifically that is rebalancing, in an eventual return to normal, organic growth. However, with increasingly tight margins, not all vendors may be able to wait.”
