Annual shipments of cellular IoT modules in 2021 increased by 39% to reach 428 million units, according to a research report from the IoT analyst firm Berg Insight. Annual revenues increased by 54% to reach US$ 5,3 billion, reflecting strong customer demand in a constrained supply environment. Even though the supply shortage has likely caused some inventory backlogs, many vendors have reported continued strong growth in the first quarter of 2022, suggesting that short-term demand remains robust.
The results of this latest cellular IoT module vendor market share assessment show that the five largest cellular module vendors, including Quectel, Fibocom, Sunsea AIoT, Thales and Telit, hold 68% of the market in terms of revenues. Overall, 2021 was a record year for the cellular IoT module industry, in which all major vendors achieved double-digit growth. China-based vendors continue to outgrow the market, in part due to the significant growth in the domestic IoT market, which now accounts for more than 55% of the global cellular module demand.
4G LTE is the dominant technology as LTE Cat-1, NB-IoT and LTE-M replace 2G and 3G technologies in the low- to mid-market segments. LTE Cat-1 module shipments almost tripled in 2021, driven by strong uptake in China where adoption of LTE Cat-1 comes somewhat at the expense of NB-IoT shipments that recorded slowing growth year-on-year. Similar to the previous year, NB-IoT module shipments were largely confined to China with shipments internationally only in the single-digit millions driven primarily by smart gas meter and smart water meter deployments.
LTE Cat-1 modules also account for a major share of the volume in North America, Europe and parts of the Asia-Pacific region, though LTE-M is viewed as an increasingly attractive alternative for IoT devices with stricter requirements on power consumption and long lifecycle. As both LTE-M and NB-IoT are 5G-ready, they are suitable for IoT devices that will stay in the field for more than 10 years, which may prove critical as mobile operators in advanced markets will start to sunset their 4G LTE networks near the end of the decade. LTE-M module shipments far exceed NB-IoT shipments outside of China. The ability to perform over-the-air software upgrades of LTE-M devices has proven to be the key factor for the technology’s success compared to NB-IoT.
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