- eSIM technologies have been steadily seeing increasing acceptance and are set to increase in huge numbers over the next few years.
- Of the increasing segments, smartphones and enterprise IoT devices such as embedded security, infrastructure, smart cities and smart farming will contribute the highest margins via both hardware and integrated eSIMs.
Alongside these, the rise of connected cars and a steady growth of wearable technologies are also poised to contribute significantly to the growth of eSIM adoption.
Counterpoint Research’s Emerging Technology Opportunities (ETO) survey states that adoption of eSIM technologies will increase by over 5 times by 2025.
According to the same report, while there were 364 million eSIM equipped devices shipped globally through 2018, the year 2025 will see that figure rise to over 2 billion. Other categories that would also contribute to the rise of eSIM adoption include aerial drones, routers and mesh network adapters, and tablet, laptop and convertible space.
Impact of this growth
Satyajit Sinha, analyst at Counterpoint Research, stated that eSIM’s compact form factor offered significant space reduction for device manufacturers along with higher security, re-programmability, and power efficiencies over the traditional SIM card solutions. For operators, eSIMs can significantly reduce the SIM distribution and activation costs with the potential to generate higher roaming revenues.
Furthermore, eSIM offers great benefits for consumers and enterprise customers to seamlessly choose, activate, connect, and manage connectivity on their devices.
What the future holds
With respect to this surge, it remains to be seen how the adoption curve rises. Given that the e-SIM adoption is expected to grow over 500 percent within six years globally, a lot more eSIM-embedded services can be witnessed to become mainstream in the near future.
