The Asia/Pacific (APAC) region will lead the internet of things market in terms of spending this year, with around 35.7% of the global spend, followed by the U.S. and Western Europe with 27.3% and 21.2% of the total IoT spend in 2019 respectively, according to new research from IDC.
China is the top IoT spender in the APAC region, with $168.6 billion for 2019, followed by South Korea and India with outlays of $26.2 billion and $20.6 billion in 2019 respectively.
“In Asia/Pacific, there is considerable support and mandates from governments, such as China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, to promote the development of IoT across all major industries, particularly energy and resources, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, government, healthcare, and retail. In China and Hong Kong, individual municipalities have embarked on Smart City zones in cooperation with local universities and businesses,” said Ashutosh Bisht, senior research manager at IDC Asia/Pacific. “Willingness towards the implementation of 5G infrastructure will help to accelerate IoT growth of applications that will benefit from low-latency and more bandwidth such as video-centric applications,” Bisht added.
According to IDC, the three industries with the highest IoT spending this year will be discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, and utilities. Together, these three industries will account for nearly 40% of worldwide IoT spend in 2019. The primary IoT use case for the two manufacturing industries will be manufacturing operations and production asset management while Utilities industry spending will largely go toward Smart Grid. The industries that will see the fastest compound annual growth rates (CAGR) over the five-year forecast period are construction (15%), telecommunication (14.2%) and healthcare (13.6%), IDC said.
“Spending on IoT deployments continues its good momentum across Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) region this year,” said Hugh Ujhazy, Vice President for Internet of Things and Telecommunications at IDC Asia/Pacific. “While organizations are investing in hardware, software, and services to support their IoT initiatives, their next challenge is finding solutions that help them to manage, process, and analyze the data being generated from all these connected things.”
Chinese mobile operators are leading the way in terms of IoT deployments, as they have already connected nearly 960 million devices, according to a recent study by GSMA Intelligence.
According to the report, announced last month during Mobile World Congress 2019 Shanghai, these IoT connections are enabling mass market deployments of smart home, smart industry and smart city solutions.
According to GSMA Intelligence, China is the world’s largest IoT market, with 64% of the 1.5 billion global cellular connections, including mobile IoT licensed LPWA technologies.
