Spurring IoT Innovation, APAC Dominates in Number of Public IoT Contract Awards Over the Last Decade

Global technology intelligence firm ABI Research has collated a new dataset on all publicly announced cellular module contract awards for the world’s top 10 vendors.  Quectel, Telit, and Fibocom are the leading vendors in the publicized contract award announcements. Most of the module contracts cataloged in this dataset are from business won in the Asia Pacific region, which accounts for 43% of the 230 awards total. Europe had the next largest share, accounting for 17% of all contracts, followed by North America with 8%. 26% of all contracts are considered global, i.e., for global or international businesses spanning multiple regions. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 and 2021 were bumper years for cellular module contracts. The most significant number of announcements occurred during this period, spurred by the need for more automation and remote systems monitoring in business and consumer applications.

Spanning the last decade and recording the specifics of the 230 commercial contracts, this dataset provides a detailed summary of vendors, their module products, their customers, and those customers’ devices, along with the date, region, application, and cellular technology information.

It provides a valuable cross-section of module vendor business for case study and trend analysis. It is designed to complement ABI Research’s vendor contracts categorized by application in line with ABI Research’s other IoT market data products. The data shows how trends in vendor contracts have changed over the years: which technologies are the most popular and for which application, which regions have the most contract awards for each cellular technology, and which module vendors have had the largest share of contracts by application, region, and technology.

“This is certainly not a complete set of contract awards for the top module manufacturers, though it can be taken as a fully normalized and cross-comparable slice of the whole to provide great insight into the real-world activity of the vendors that sit at the heart of enabling the entirety of the Internet of Things,” explains Jamie Moss, IoT Hardware and Devices Research Director at ABI Research. “This shines a spotlight on what is going on in the IoT space, uncovers some exciting trends, and many interesting IoT use cases from across the globe.”

These findings are from ABI Research’s Module Vendor Contract Awards market data report. This report is part of the company’s IoT Hardware and Devices research service, which includes research, data, and ABI Insights. Market Data spreadsheets comprise deep data, market share analysis, and highly segmented, service-specific forecasts to provide detailed insight into where opportunities lie.