I hope you had a fantastic New Year’s celebration surrounded by family and friends.
2024 proved to be a remarkable year. There were more democratic elections (38 to be exact) around the world than in any other year in history. There are now 5 companies with over $2 Trillion in the marketcap and 10 over $1 Trillion which is a remarkable run for the stock market. Crypto is in the midst of a historic run. GenAI kept on powering the hopes and expectations of the tech industry every quarter and remains central to the conversations going into the new year. The two wars didn’t come to an end, geo-political tensions continue to rile societies and markets, the world continue to take the tumult and devastation in stride, moving on from one crisis to another but the only constant was technological progress and endurance.
As many readers know, we do our annual survey (now in its 18th year) to engage our knowledgeable community on trends and events to keep us informed. The composite view gives a glimpse into the future scenarios. Executives, developers, and insiders from leading mobile companies and startups from across the value chain and from around the globe participated to educate us on what to expect of 2025. The survey draws upon the unique collective wisdom of the folks who are making it happen. Thanks for being part of our annual ritual.
On the tech front, we saw significant acceleration in a number of domains, something we have talked about in our research as well as at our summits.
As we have mentioned before, we have entered the Quantumverse and the tech industry is growing beyond its traditional borders to transform every vertical industry and by extension – the global GDP. Proof is in the numbers.
2024 was the year when 5G picked up a significant pace. The year was full of milestones. Over 1.8B 5G devices in the market. India racing to become the second largest 5G market ahead of the US. China Mobile crossing 1B mobile subs. Jio surpassing China Mobile in mobile data traffic, T-Mobile becoming the most dominant service provider in terms of valuation, surpassing past records, FWA rocketing to rearchitect the broadband market in the US and hitting the $10B revenue milestone (cumulative) quicker than any service in history.
5G is growing at 2x the rate of LTE with China, India, US, and Japan setting the pace of global rollouts. The opportunities at the intersection of Connected Intelligence, Vertical Industries, and emerging technologies like 5G, AI, and Edge, Private Networks, NTN, etc. are likely to unleash a decade long innovation cycle.
We will perhaps start to understand the complexity and the potential of the Quantumverse in 2025. “Automation @ Scale” was the central theme of brainstorming amongst the executives at 2024 Mobile Future Forward and we are likely to see the winners continue to focus on utilizing the evolving technical capabilities to gain an edge in an increasingly complex ecosystem that requires finesse in understanding and execution.
Despite the amazing opportunities, there are dark clouds on the horizon – global economy downturns, wars, trade skirmishes, and regional conflicts can adversely impact the trajectory. True sustainability remains a challenge for the tech industry with climate related incidents rising at a similar pace as the GenAI bots. There are a number of unanswered questions about the multi-dimensional tech industry.
2025 is going to be a pivotal year for the world in more ways than one.
The biggest stories of 2024 were the GenAI tsunami, space race, rise of Nvidia, tech lay-offs, OpenAI drama and continuous LLM launches, economy, inflation, and recession fears, big tech domination, techlash, 5G launches around the globe, US-China tech tussles, Robotics, never ending Security and privacy woes, and much more.
For 2025, it is not a surprise that GenAI will continue to dominate our attention on multiple fronts – the sheer pace of progress and its integration into the workflow, efforts to regulate AI, geo-politics, elections, etc. Given the new administration in the US, there are expectations that we are entering a new round of US-China (and others) trade and tech wars which could lead us onto uncertain paths impacting economy, strategy, and direction. Whether the nations will settle back to status quo after the initial noise is the most consequential question for the year. Calls to regulate AI will grow louder though it remains to be seen if we will narrow the gap of knowledge and expectations between the regulators and the tech ecosystem.
Automation is coming (in some segments it is already here), it will impact jobs, but the societies are largely unprepared for the disruption it will cause. There is already a lot of chatter about 6G – these will grow louder as the year progresses. EU is likely to continue its strategy of regulation US technology companies as a way of compensating for its lackluster tech economy. Startups are driving new experiences. Computing has entered a renaissance era. Most of the pieces of the Quantumverse are coming together.
We are settling on our perceptions of which trends are here to stay and which ones are showing signs of reversal. Microsoft is slated for the biggest acquisition of the year. Alphabet remains the company the regulators are most likely going to breakup. Many in the ecosystem have settled on the notion that China has edged out US in the 5G race and now all eyes are on 6G. The probability of splinternet is going to go up in the coming year.
The 2025 survey delved deeper this year to understand the progression of 5G, GenAI, and automation.
As we go into 2025, there are new questions to ponder over – How will GenAI be integrated and optimized across networks, nodes, devices, and data centers. Are we capable of settling the thorny issues around ethics, policy, copyrights, and transparency? Will explainability become central to design or are we going to hallucinate our way through it? Will Vision Pro reshape the spatial computing landscape, or will we have to wait for a few years? Will mobile operators move beyond the obvious into enterprise solutions to monetize 5G? Will regulatory frameworks get a reboot? As you know, we have been exploring all these concepts under the umbrella of “Connected Intelligence”.
Mobile Company of the Year: Apple and T-Mobile were voted as the joint companies of the year for their stupendous success and competitive position in the industry. Apple ended the year being the most valuable company on the planet again while T-Mobile reasserted its position as the most valuable service provider in the world. Nvidia, Qualcomm, and OpenAI rounded out the top 5. Qualcomm is expected to have the honors for 2025.
Tech Person of the Year: By a big margin, Jensen Huang, CEO and Founder of Nvidia was the crowd favorite for our tech person of the year. He has brilliantly led Nvidia as the kingmaker of the AI led tech ecosystem and everybody is reacting to what Nvidia does. Sam Altman, Cristiano Amon, Mike Sievert, and Elon Musk rounded the top 5. For the year 2025, Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai won the top honors.
As we embark on 2025, we extend our heartfelt wishes for your continued success throughout the year.
Thanks, and hope to see you in person in 2025.
With Best Wishes,
Chetan Sharma (and team)
The questions of the survey:
- What were the biggest mobile stories in 2024?
- What will be the biggest mobile stories of 2025?
- Who are the top 4 important players in the mobile ecosystem?
- What will be the breakthrough categories in mobile in 2025?
- What trends are permanent or temporary?
- Which technology made the biggest leap in the next two years?
- Biggest challenge for tech companies in 2025?
- Which industries will be shaped/disrupted the most by GenAI?
- Most successful GenAI company that will shape the next 2-3 years?
- How far are we from AGI?
- What happens to AI hype cycle in 2025?
- What is likely to happen in 2025 (Telco and GenAI)?
- Which country will lead in AI?
- Which operator will lead in AI?
- Who will make the biggest mobile acquisition in 2025?
- Regulators are likely to pursue Breakup for which of these companies?
- Which category will generate the most mobile data revenue in 2025?
- The company bringing the most successful mobile gadget of the year – 2024 and 2025?
- Mobile company of the year – 2024 and 2025?
- What’s the most convincing use case for 5G?
- Who is doing the most interesting work in the 5G space?
- Which region will end up leading the world in 5G in 2025?
- What aspects of 5G are going to generate the most revenue?
- What 5G applications and services will get the most traction?
- Who will be the winners of the 5G technology transition?
- Shall we 6G?
- Automation and Digitization of industries will lead to?
- Which of the following are likely to happen in 2025?
- What category will be impacted the most by mobile in the next 5 years?
- Which segments are likely to get disintermediated the most by algorithms in the next 5 years?
- Who was and will be the tech person of the year?
