Global
· With each passing day, more consumers are connected and are using more connected devices. The connected intelligence era is starting to take shape.
· It is not just a western market phenomenon, the connected age is reaching the far corners of the planet.
· The total number of connected devices will reach 16 billion by the end of 2015.
· The biggest category of the devices will still be feature phones followed by smartphones and personal computers.
· By 2020, Industrial and Smartphones will become the top two connected devices categories.
US
· There are two broad connected categories of consumer spend: Access and Devices.
· On average, each US household will spend approximately $3800 on access and devices in 2015.
· Roughly 80% or $3000 of the US household spend will go to access of services such as cellular voice, mobile data, cable, landline voice, and broadband internet.
· Roughly 20% or $800 of the US household spend will go to devices such as computers, smartphones, feature phones, wearables, tablets, e-readers, connected cars, drones, robots, connected home, and other connected devices.
· 41% of the household access spend will go to cellular phones (for voice and data services).
· As a standalone category, mobile data is the biggest category approaching $1000 in yearly household spend.
· In the last 5 years, mobile data spend has risen the most and landline voice has declined the most. Cellular voice spend has also gone down while cable and broadband spend have seen relatively modest uptick.
· In devices, smartphones is by far the biggest spend category. Consumers spend almost 3x on smartphones than they spend on personal computers. Smartphones will account for more than 50% of the US household connected spend in 2015.
· New categories such as wearables, connected cars, drones/robotics, and connected homes have started to make a tangible impact on consumer spend.
· For the first time, US consumers will spend more on wearables than feature phones in 2015.
· Chetan Sharma Consulting conducted its annual Connected Consumer survey of 1000 US households.
· The number of connected devices per US household is now 5.3 with over 37% of the households in the 4-8 range.
· Almost 6% of the households have 15 or more connected devices.
· In terms of geography, US Northeast households had the highest number of devices per households.
· In terms of urban density, urban, rural, and suburban neighborhoods exhibited similar propensity to acquire connected devices.
· In terms of household income, households with annual income of $150K or more had almost 10 connected devices. Next income bracket was $75-100K with 6.6 connected devices.
· US operators have been seeing a bulk of their net-adds come from connected devices (for more details, please refer US Wireless Market Updates).
· In the most recent quarter (Q2 2015), 62% of the net-adds were from non-phone devices such as tablets, cars, and m2m (more details to come in our Q2 2015 US Wireless Market Update next week).
We will be taking a deep dive into the Connected Intelligence Ecosystem and Opportunities in our upcoming summit Mobile Future Forward on Sept 29th.
Your feedback is always welcome.
Chetan Sharma
We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds, future research reports, articles, and our annual thought-leadership summit – Mobile Future Forward. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Aug 2015.