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eSIM: State of the consumer market and the road ahead
Momentum for eSIM is accelerating in the consumer market, opening up new opportunities for mobile ecosystem players and enabling new benefits for consumers. By 2025, 2.4 billion smartphone connections will use eSIM globally. As market adoption grows and eSIM becomes part of day-to-day business, having a clear roadmap and strategy will be crucial to capture and monetise the new opportunities presented by eSIM.
This report focuses on the eSIM consumer market, providing a unique and fact-based update on the state of the market and its future outlook. It looks at the latest developments and trends in terms of eSIM consumer devices (smartphones, smartwatches, tablets and laptops), eSIM service commercialisation (how many operators have launched eSIM service and in what countries) and new use cases (e.g. 5G FWA). It also examines and segments consumer awareness of eSIM.
Looking to the future, the report also considers what needs to be done by the eSIM ecosystem (including OEMs, MNOs, MVNOs, and vendors of eSIM solutions and platforms) to fully leverage the business potential of eSIM and scale market adoption in the coming years.
The GSMA appreciates the collaboration of Giesecke+Devrient and Valid as partners for this report.
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eSIM: State of the consumer market and the road ahead
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eSIM will unlock LPWAN-based IoT opportunities
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Learn moreRelated research
The digital consumer in 2026: how consumer behaviour is changing across 5G, AI, eSIM, devices and content
Leveraging data from the 2025 survey, conducted between June and August, this report provides relevant insights into how the consumer behaviour is changing across eight topic areas: 5G; devices; eSIM; generative AI; pay TV; gaming; the metaverse and extended reality; and sustainability.
Consumers in Focus: eSIM User Behaviour Survey Dashboard 2026
This dashboard, based on GSMA Intelligence 2025 consumer survey, provides all the relevant data related to eSIM user behaviour in a consistent and structured way – a valuable asset for companies looking to formulate or adjust their consumer commercial strategies and plans.
eSIM will unlock LPWAN-based IoT opportunities
eSIM technology can help solve a number of issues for low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) as they scale into large-scale deployments. These issues include the higher cost and complexity of provisioning devices with physical SIM cards, device and lifecycle management, and higher opex due to required human intervention. The greater the adoption and spread of LPWAN, the greater the operational challenges for IoT service providers – but eSIM can address most of these challenges.
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