The market for traditional SIM cards, currently on the decline, is ceding ground to the eSIM ecosystem. 5.53 billion SIM cards were shipped in 2018, compared to 5.54 billion in 2017. Challenging market conditions are expected to facilitate another shipment decrease of -0.1%, likely translating into another market contraction in 2019 due to several factors.
Recent Posts
The launch of the first wave of 5G commercial services has been crowned a great success, with credit going to Qualcomm and its partners for the impressive milestones they have managed to achieve with 5G just 6 months after the first commercial launch of enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services. They have rolled out 30+ 5G networks around the world, supported by 20+ device models, the majority of which are powered by Qualcomm chipsets. This is worthy of a well-deserved celebration during the Qualcomm 5G Summit this week.
Novel technologies and markets share very similar patterns: a hype cycle, followed by a steep decline as realistic barriers and obstacles become more apparent, ultimately followed by substantial growth as those barriers are overcome. The speed at which these new technologies and markets catch on is based on an amalgamation of near infinite factors, with the fastest growing opportunities often the ones with the most objective, understandable value in usage outweighing and outpacing those barriers.
5G is being billed as a technology powerhouse due to its superiority over its predecessors. It provides an abundance of network capacity, higher bandwidth, and lower latency in comparison to LTE and other previous generation technologies. As suppliers and mobile service providers increase adoption of 5G, however, they tend to view success in relativity to the network speed and performance of their competitors. The most powerful 5G network isn't solely correlated with improved bandwidth and latency.
It's no surprise that with the surging popularity of ride-hailing in recent years, the market continues to flourish. Meanwhile, increased urbanization and lack of affordability has led to the steady decline of the traditional passenger car market. However, despite nearly 22 billion trips completed in 2018 and 28 billion expected by the end of this year, ride-hailing vendors are experiencing unprecedented losses. Uber reported a net loss of $1.1 billion in the first quarter of 2019, even in the wake of increased earnings and usage — an alarming number that begs the question of long-term sustainability for this market in its current state.
In the wake of Apple's unveiling of a new iPhone at their most recent hardware event in September, ABI Research forecasts that smartphone shipments with some type of foldable, flexible, or rollable display will start picking up steam as early as 2020, with growth to reach 228 million in 2028. Not only will smartphones see flexible displays applied to their hardware, but tablets are also in line for this enhancement, which will bring the total number of devices impacted to 240 million over that timeframe.
The future of 5G lies in the enterprise. Use cases across different vertical markets, such as industrial automation, cloud gaming, private Long-Term Evolution (LTE), and smart transport systems, will become pervasive, unlocking new opportunities for Mobile Service Providers (MSPs) along the way.
The home robotics future many of us have imagined is here, although adoption into the technology has been limited to date. Pricing, availability, and consumer awareness are some of the factors involved, but another overlooked facet is the current disconnect between home robots and smart home technology. While robots in the home have always to some degree been a widely anticipated endeavor, smart home has emerged as a vital complement, and vendors are beginning to see increased value in supporting integration of their products into the smart home ecosystem. This is borne out in the projection of nearly 79 million homes worldwide that will feature a robot inside the home by 2024.
With worldwide urban populations on the rise year after year, smart cities project developers are searching for ways to create increasingly intelligent, efficient, and sustainable solutions. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been the technological starting block, but as IoT usage and implementation expands its reach across several verticals, increased digitization needed to power smart cities has also brought additional cybersecurity risks to the IoT ecosystem — threatening the momentum of current and future projects. In 2024, three industries — financial, information and communication, and defense — will account for over half of the projected $135 billion total allotted to mitigating cybersecurity within the IoT infrastructure. The remaining 44% is designated to be split among several platforms considered integral to smart city growth:
The collective whisper amongst would-be cord cutters is pervasive — many consumers suggest that paying a monthly premium for channels and content they aren't regularly consuming has heightened the urge to switch to streaming platform services like Apple TV, Netflix, or Hulu. Although your regional cable provider faces a continuously difficult challenge in keeping customers and generating revenue, the pay TV market is not expected to meet its end anytime soon. In fact, its subscriber base is projected to grow at a steady pace to over 1.1 billion in 2024.