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IoT connections update: impact of Covid-19 on our forecast

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, GSMA Intelligence has updated its forecast dataset, outlining the impact of the crisis on IoT connections growth, for the 2010-2021 period.

A few key findings:

GSMA Intelligence forecasts that total IoT connections will double between 2019 and 2025, reaching 24 billion, a slower rate growth compared to our December 2019 forecast, due to the contractions in IoT projects demand and funding.

But the crisis stressed a renewed dependency on digital tools, highlighting the greater need for automation to support business continuity. For operators, this trend resulted in an increased interest from enterprises customers for cloud and data analytics solutions.

Across consumer IoT, we expect connected vehicles to be the most impacted segment, with a forecasted growth of less than 2% in 2020, whilst smart city projects are put on hold and retail remains forever changed.

The hopeful side highlights that enterprises already embarked in their digital transformation journeys are coping much better, and, according to our 2019 IoT survey, 65% of these companies deployed IoT as part of their digitisation agendas.

Overall, these projects might be suffering delays in the short term, but we foresee that the crisis will accelerate the move to digital and companies adopting IoT, AI/ML and 5G to drive digital transformation in the longer term, as we settle into the new normal.

Click here to read our executive summary on the shape of the market.

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