BLE Beacon Shipments Break 400 Million in 2020

​ABI Research’s report, BLE Tags: The Location of Things (LOT) reveals that total BLE Beacon shipments will comfortably exceed 400 million units in 2020.

Principal Analyst Patrick Connolly comments, “BLE Beacons are cropping up everywhere, with particularly strong growth coming in Enterprise / Industrial, IoT and connected home, as well as more established markets like retail and personal asset tracking. The arrival of Eddystone is a huge driver here, particularly in non-retail markets, where new signals and features are particularly beneficial. However, this year there have been significant advances around network management, meshing, technology hybridization and software-based beacon upgrades. All of these advances are creating confidence with huge shipments into unexpected areas like asset tracking and industrial.”

Pure Beacon shipment revenues are expected to break US$1 Billion but the real opportunity is in network management and analytics. Although there are exceptions like Radius Networks and Perples, retail will be a tough business for beacon start-ups, especially when the majority of future revenues are in advertising. Instead, many are starting to focus on specific non-retail verticals, where individual contracts are much larger with a higher RoI on services like analytics.

“Three very interesting verticals are asset tracking, vending machines and dedicated BLE beacon advertising networks, where OEMs like Gimbal, Sensoro, Kontakt.io, and Bluvision are having initial success. BLE Beacons can completely revolutionize these markets and ABI Research expects early adopters will gain a huge advantage.”

These findings are part of ABI Research’s new BLE Beacon Technologies and Services Market Research.

ABI Research provides technology market research and technology intelligence for industry innovators. From offices in North America, Europe and Asia, ABI Research’s worldwide team of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 70+ research and advisory services. Est. 1990. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.