Recently, Berg Insight, an independent market research and consulting firm focusing on the global IoT sector, released the latest data on the full-year market situation of cellular IoT modules in 2025: In 2025, the annual shipment volume of cellular IoT modules, excluding automotive NAD modules, reached 612 million units, a year-on-year growth of 33%; the annual revenue of cellular IoT modules grew by 19% to reach $5.6 billion.
These data indicate that the market is recovering, but it also implies that module prices and component costs will face increasing pressure. For cellular IoT device manufacturers, 2025 is not just a year of returning to growth, but also signifies that the recovery of sales volume and the recovery of value in the module supply chain are no longer synchronized.
This article will integrate data from other institutions to interpret the current market situation and future development.
Inventory Digestion and Local Policies Jointly Boost the Recovery
Regarding market growth rates, even before Berg Insight, two other research institutions had already provided data—
A report released by Counterpoint Research in March 2026 shows that global cellular IoT module shipments grew by 15% year-on-year in 2025, maintaining a steady growth trend in the market.
The 2025-2026 Cellular IoT Module Market Outlook report released by TSR in February 2026 indicates that global cellular IoT module shipments grew by 23% year-on-year in 2025, reaching 544 million units, with market revenue of approximately $3.93 billion.
In comparison, it is evident that Berg Insight's data showing a 33% year-on-year growth is the most aggressive. The differences in the three institutions' assessments of the 2025 cellular IoT module market do not essentially lie in "who is right or wrong," but rather in the high probability of differing statistical calibers and market definitions. Berg Insight adopts a broader "shipment perspective," covering a wider range of cellular IoT module types, especially Cat-1 bis, NB-IoT, and low-cost terminals widely deployed in the Chinese market, thus more easily reflecting the amplification effect of "channel shipments and inventory replenishment." Counterpoint Research may lean more towards "end-device demand and revenue quality," emphasizing the actual deployment pace and structural growth, and therefore might exclude some highly volatile broad IoT shipments, resulting in a relatively conservative overall judgment. TSR's model falls between the two, applying stricter screening for regional and technological classifications, thus presenting median results in terms of scale and growth rate.
Nevertheless, the three institutions share a consistent understanding of the market rebound trend. Berg Insight believes that this round of rebound mainly stems from the recovery of demand in major global regions, while one of the important reasons for the previous market downturn was excessively high customer inventory. In reality, a significant portion of the shipment growth in 2025 originated from the digestion of excess inventory in the channels, rather than merely the expansion of new demand in the end market.
The report also points out that local policies in certain countries have brought additional growth momentum, including China and Spain. This is particularly crucial because the demand for cellular IoT modules is often driven not only by enterprises' own digitalization needs but also deeply influenced by regulatory policies and public sector projects. Smart metering, payment systems, utilities, public infrastructure, and compliance-driven equipment replacement cycles can all generate concentrated demand for specific module categories even when overall corporate IoT investment remains cautious.
Berg Insight forecasts that by 2030, cellular IoT module shipments will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7%, reaching 878 million units. Compared to the high growth of 33% in 2025, this implies that the market growth rate post-inventory adjustment will gradually return to normal.
The Gap Between Shipment Growth and Revenue Growth Deserves Attention
The core contradiction in IoT market growth is not whether it accelerates; the gap between shipment growth and revenue growth is one of the most noteworthy signals in this report. Calculations based on Berg Insight's data show that although the overall market has achieved rapid expansion in shipment scale, the average revenue per module has declined year-on-year. For OEMs and connected hardware suppliers, this means that demand has indeed recovered, but market pricing power remains unevenly distributed.
Berg Insight points out that memory price pressure is becoming a new structural variable in the cellular IoT market. Its root cause lies not in the IoT itself, but in the continuous absorption of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) capacity by AI servers and data centers.
This change has created a cross-industry supply chain transmission effect: although IoT modules and AI servers do not have a direct competitive relationship in end applications, they share the upstream semiconductor and memory supply systems, causing the IoT industry to passively bear the cost spillover brought by the expansion of AI infrastructure.
Unlike the traditional "shortage cycle," the impact of this round is more reflected in sustained upward price pressure rather than supply shortages. Among them, 5G modules, due to higher memory configurations and stronger reliance on advanced DRAM, have been hit the most obviously, while 4G LTE modules with traditional memory architectures have a relatively certain buffer space. However, Berg Insight also notes that very few products can be completely immune to this trend.
A deeper change lies in the fact that this trend is reshaping the operational logic of the industry. The cost structure of cellular IoT modules no longer possesses high stability, and suppliers are beginning to frequently introduce periodic price adjustment mechanisms and contract price linkage clauses to cope with component cost fluctuations. For OEMs and system integrators, this means that the "stable BOM assumption" relied upon for long-term product planning is being broken. In industrial IoT and utility scenarios characterized by multi-year life cycles, cost uncertainty will directly transmit to business model design, project estimation, and investment return cycle evaluation, which undoubtedly increases the complexity of long-term product planning.
The Overall Market Competitive Landscape Remains Concentrated
From the perspective of the competitive landscape, the cellular module market remains highly concentrated. According to Berg Insight data, in 2025, the top five vendors—Quectel, Fibocom, Telit Cinterion, MeiG, and China Mobile—collectively accounted for 73% of the market revenue share (note: this is revenue share, not shipment share).
However, from the perspective of shipment volume, the leading position is largely determined by the domestic Chinese market. Quectel, China Mobile, Sunsea AIoT, Lierda, and Fibocom are the main shipment leaders, benefiting from the massive local demand in the Chinese market. Meanwhile, ZXInfoTek has risen rapidly, establishing a clear advantage especially in the POS terminal field. The demand for connectivity modules in this segment is closely related to the replacement and deployment cycles of payment devices.
The landscape of the chipset market also reinforces the same regional trend. Berg Insight estimates that in 2025, the shipment volume of cellular IoT chipsets, excluding automotive-grade products, reached 706 million units, with ASR, Qualcomm, Shanghai Mobiletek, UNISOC, CellWise, and MediaTek being the major suppliers. Among them, domestic Chinese chipset manufacturers performed particularly strongly. ASR, Shanghai Mobiletek, and CellWise all achieved steady growth in LTE Cat-1 bis and NB-IoT chipsets. While Qualcomm maintained a dominant position in LTE-M, high-end 4G LTE, and 5G eMBB chipsets.
In the report, due to having different supply chain systems, the data for automotive-grade modules (NAD modules) are counted separately—Quectel ranks first with a 27% shipment market share, Rolling Wireless ranks second with a 13% share, and other major NAD module vendors include TCU suppliers LG Electronics and Aumovio, as well as Kontron, Guangtong Yuanchi, a subsidiary of Fibocom, MeiG, and Compal. The automotive-grade chipset market is dominated by Qualcomm, with MediaTek ranking second.
The report forecasts that NAD module shipments will grow from 78 million units in 2025 to 98 million units in 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 4.6% during the period.
Highly Diversified Development of the IoT Market
The IoT is continuously evolving and expanding into new application fields. The entire market is highly diversified and has formed multiple technological ecosystems. In addition to focusing on the 3GPP-based cellular communication technology ecosystem and LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) technologies such as LoRa and Sigfox, Berg Insight's report also covers other low-power IoT technologies, such as IEEE 802.15.4-based protocols, Wirepas Mesh, DECT-2020 NR (NR+), and Mioty.
LoRa is gradually becoming an important platform for global IoT device connectivity. As of early 2026, the cumulative shipment volume of LoRa end nodes has reached 500 million units. Currently, most of the demand comes from private network deployments, which remains the mainstream deployment mode for LoRa networks. The main application scenarios include smart gas and water metering, followed by localized IoT deployments for smart sensors and tracking devices in cities, industrial parks, and commercial buildings. In the coming years, smart homes are expected to become one of the important application fields for LoRa, mainly driven by the expansion of Amazon Sidewalk network outside the United States. Berg Insight estimates that the annual shipment volume of LoRa devices reached 90 million units in 2025, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17.5% to 202 million units by 2030.
Other low-power IoT device ecosystems, such as IEEE 802.15.4, Wirepas Mesh, Sigfox, Mioty, and NR+, also have the potential to grow into important IoT connectivity platforms in the coming years. Among them, IEEE 802.15.4 has currently achieved the most extensive application deployment, is the most mature in this group of technologies, and has gained support from multiple leading smart metering manufacturers.
As of early 2026, the installed base of Wirepas Mesh has exceeded 20 million and has been deployed in multiple large-scale projects. The installed base of Sigfox reached 15 million by the end of 2025. UnaBiz, a Sigfox operator headquartered in Singapore, took over Sigfox in 2022, re-planning the Sigfox technology roadmap and its commercial operation model. Berg Insight believes that whether Sigfox can gain recognition in the asset tracking market in the future will be a critical test for its development.
Mioty has begun to gain more attention in the smart water metering field over the past few years, and its installed base has currently exceeded 1 million. Meanwhile, DECT-2020 NR (NR+) is still in an earlier stage of development, with current deployments mainly concentrated in pilot projects and initial commercial applications.
References:
- The Cellular IoT and LPWA Chipset and Module Market, Berg Insight
- 2025 IoT Module Industry Report Released: Lierda's Shipments Grow 69% Year-on-Year, Ranking Fourth Globally, Lierda
- Cellular IoT Module Market Returns to Double-Digit Growth as Revenues Reach $5.6 Billion, IoT Business
- Cellular IoT reached new heights in 2025, Computer Weekly
- Top 5 Chinese Cellular IoT Module Vendors Account for Nearly 70% of Global Shipments, Requiring Attention to a Series of New Challenges, IoT Think Tank