The GSMA Connected Life
We've been doing a lot of work at Machina Research supporting the GSMA's initiative (see here for more details). And what better opportunity than MAC to highlight some of our key findings about the Asia-Pacific region in 2020, the most connected region in the world.
- Asia-Pacific will dominate the global market for connected devices. In 2020 it accounts for 46% of devices, 47% of SIM-based devices and 41% of machine-to-machine connections. It represents 38% of the US$1.2 trillion global MNO addressable market opportunity (US$447 billion).
- In 2020 China will be the biggest market in the world for connected devices: 20% in 2020 up from 16% today. The revenue opportunity for MNOs is US$180 billion, 2nd only to the US’s US$225 billion. Much of this growth comes from M2M in Consumer Electronics (due to growing disposable income), Intelligent Buildings and Utilities (the latter two particularly due to improvements in the housing stock and government mandating of smart metering).
- Japan and South Korea will be the most connected societies on the planet. They average 11 connected devices per head of population (global average = 3). Japan has the highest MNO addressable revenue for connected devices per head of population in the world with USD660/head.
- India is the big emerging mobile opportunity beyond 2020. It's the 5th biggest market in 2020, worth a potential USD43 billion to MNOs in 2020. With only 0.2 M2M devices per head of population (global ave. 1.73), accounting for only 3% of cellular (Japan 79%, China 58%), there's a lot of room for growth.
Automotive M2M session
I ran a very interesting session on Thursday on automotive telematics (with a bit on utilities too), with Fran Dance of BMW and Ed Pleet of Ford, talking about their companies' respective approaches to automotive M2M. This was particularly interesting as they have chosen to take very different approaches. BMW's focus is on connecting the vehicle itself, while Ford's approach is to make use of the driver's own connectivity (i.e. the smartphone). There are strengths to both approaches. For in-vehicle entertainment, for instance, I am wholeheartedly of the view that the driver (or passenger) will want to access their own content through their own device. However, for some of the applications that involve no user intervention (e.g. security/tracking, eCall etc) then I'm of the view that it's more naturally the vehicle that is connected. If you're interested in this area you could do worse than check out Machina Research's report Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communication in the Automotive Sector 2010-20, published earlier this year.
Of course the session covered a lot more ground than I'm talking about here. Apparently the session was being recorded and should be available some time on Mobile World Live. I'll keep you posted if it does become available and you'll be able to enjoy it for yourself.
Other nuggets of information
If you were following me on twitter (@mattyhatton) then you'll have seen some of my comments on news from the keynotes. Some very interesting stuff. Here's a few things from the keynotes.
- Nice to hear Anne Bouverot, the GSMA's DG, name-checking Machina Research and our figure of 24 billion connected devices worldwide in 2020.
- China Mobile is going aggressively after the M2M space with its Smart Cities initiative. 160 cities are already signed up. No wonder we're expecting China to be #1 M2M market by 2020.
- NTT DoCoMo has found a unique way of dealing with mobile broadband demand. In congest cells it downgrades the service to any user who has been a heavy user over the previous three days. Cute. And a good way to deal with its expected 12-fold growth in mobile data between now and 2015 (which sounds a rather high estimate to me). They're also planning 98% LTE coverage by 2014. Particularly relevant for DoCoMo as they're (I think) the only MNO whose data revenue exceeds voice.
This has been a bit of a hotch-potch blogpost. Ideally I'd have told you lots more but Q4 is always the busiest time for us analysts and this year more so than any other for me. Drop me a line if you're interested in any of the above.
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