Technologies Enabling Smart Cities in Asia/Pacific to Reach $28.3 Billion in 2018: IDC

The market for the technologies that enable Smart Cities initiatives in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) is expected to reach $28.3 billion in 2018, according to the first-ever IDC Worldwide Semiannual Smart Cities Spending Guide. As these initiatives gain traction, IDC expects spending to accelerate over the 2016-2021 forecast period, reaching to $45.3 billion in 2021.

“For the first time since 2006, when IDC first discovered and documented the birth of Smart Cities, we are proud to launch our global Smart Cities tracker and spending guide,” said Gerald Wang, Head of Public Sector at IDC Asia Pacific. “This research spans an exhaustive compilation of worldwide Smart City projects across a wide 41 categories of use cases. This is expected to aid both technology buyers as well as market suppliers to have a greater grasp of the broad trends, niche opportunities, as well as best practices in both regional and global Smart City programs.”

Key investments for Asia Pacific Smart Cities are notably in intelligent transportation, data-driven public safety, and resilient energy and infrastructure, although a deeper dive suggests different prioritization across 1st, 2nd and 3rd tier cities in the region.

Intelligent traffic transit and Fixed usual surveillance are seeing maximum impetus from the government sector for stream lining the traffic and towards more secured cities, with the two use cases representing more than 36 percent share of the overall spending throughout the forecast period (2017-21). However, over the forecast period (2017-21), Vehicle to Everything (V2X) Connectivity and Officer Wearables (Fitbit/smart glasses) use cases will grow exceptionally at a five-year CAGR of 45 percent and 43.3 percent respectively.

Services accounts for the highest spending with 32.5 percent share of the overall spending in 2017, and the trend is likely to observe a linear growth with a five-year CAGR (2017-2021) of 21.2 percent and reach $16.7 billion by 2021. Hardware is the second largest technology group with $31.7 billion spending followed by Software (18 percent) and Connectivity (17.8 percent) for 2017.

Throughout the forecast period, software is expected to grow fastest at a five-year CAGR of 17.7 percent and reach $8.3 billion by 2021. In all the four segments of technology groups, State/Local Government and Transportation are the two leading industries with the maximum usage of Fixed Visual Surveillance and intelligent transportation use cases. These use cases attract considerable investments in all the countries of APeJ.

(For more information visit https://www.idc.com).