According to Berg Insight, shipments of cellular IoT modules climbed to 612 million units in 2025, driven by progress in industrial deployments despite fluctuating prices.
Yearly revenue rose 19 percent, reaching $5.6 billion when automotive network access devices are excluded. Industrial operators drove this uptake following a phase of sluggish demand, which was caused by excess stock held by customers. Factory automation leaders had previously put hardware purchases on hold while they worked through accumulated component inventories.
New deployment energy came driven by specific local regulatory requirements in Spain and China. These rules compel utility companies to modernize their smart metering systems using more recent cellular technologies. Market analysts project that the sector will expand at a seven percent compound annual growth rate, reaching 878 million units by 2030.
Production capacity collides with AI infrastructure
Pricing pressure on memory is restricting cellular IoT procurement in 2026. Chip manufacturers are steadily shifting production capacity away from IoT parts and toward high-bandwidth memory products destined for AI servers and data center infrastructure.
Plant managers purchasing connectivity equipment now encounter steep price pressure rather than outright component scarcity. Operations technology teams that plan sensor networks spanning entire factories must revise their capital expenditure plans to factor in this silicon premium.
Advanced 5G modules are the most exposed to these market dynamics. These units demand greater memory density and depend on sophisticated DRAM technologies. This hardware footprint places them in a direct contest for resources with AI supply chains.
Engineers setting up high-speed robotics and real-time video analytics platforms face the full impact of these rising costs. Operations directors deploying 4G LTE modules built on older memory architectures encounter less exposure to the current price swings. Still, almost no product range is entirely free from the pricing strain.
Hardware suppliers are introducing regular price reviews and drafting new contractual frameworks to handle fluctuations in component expenses. Supply chain leaders must overhaul their fixed-price procurement approaches to incorporate these variable costs during extensive sensor deployments, shifting away from predictable bulk-buying arrangements and toward dynamic pricing contracts.
Vendor consolidation and market share
Five equipment manufacturers account for 73 percent of worldwide income in the cellular module sector: Quectel, Fibocom, Telit Cinterion, MeiG, and China Mobile IoT.
Volume leadership stays concentrated among China-headquartered suppliers Quectel, China Mobile IoT, Sunsea AIoT, Lierda, and Fibocom. These makers gain enormously from the vast scale of their home industrial market. Fleet management firms and logistics companies procure millions of these affordable modules to track shipping containers across the globe.
ZXInfoTek has earned a notable market foothold by providing hardware tailored for point-of-sale terminals. Retail operations managers who adopt ZXInfoTek modules benefit from dedicated hardware pipelines optimized for low-bandwidth financial transactions.
Silicon architecture and network selection
Deliveries of cellular IoT chipsets hit 706 million units during 2025, not counting automotive-grade hardware. Six principal manufacturers provide this foundational silicon: ASR Microelectronics, Qualcomm, Eigencomm, UNISOC, Xinyi, and MediaTek. Enterprise deployment frameworks rely entirely on the capabilities of this base silicon.
Chinese chip designers ASR, Eigencomm, and Xinyi achieved significant volume growth across LTE Cat-1 bis and NB-IoT architectures. Operations technology teams select these low-power protocols for stationary environmental monitoring, pipeline pressure sensors, and basic asset tracking setups. Streamlining the silicon design extends field battery longevity and keeps parts expenses manageable.
Qualcomm dominates the supply chain for bandwidth-intensive applications, maintaining its market position in LTE-M, premium 4G LTE, and 5G eMBB chipsets. Demanding industrial uses — including automated guided vehicles, robotic assembly systems, and real-time machine vision — require this premium tier.
This performance divide comprollers procurement managers to carefully align particular field requirements with available hardware capabilities. Budgets must accommodate premium Qualcomm pricing for low-latency robotics while handling increasingly unstable component expenses throughout the wider sensor network.
See also: Supermicro expands edge AI systems for industrial IoT workloads
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