Cellular IoT module shipments reached 612 million units in 2025 as industrial deployments advanced against pricing volatility, according to Berg Insight.
Annual sales grew 19 percent to $5.6 billion, excluding automotive network access devices. Industrial operators consumed this volume following a period of weak demand caused by high customer inventory levels. Factory automation directors previously paused hardware acquisition while working through stockpiled components.
Fresh deployment momentum originated from specific local policy mandates in Spain and China. These regulations force utility providers to upgrade smart metering infrastructure to newer cellular standards. Forecasters expect the market to expand at a seven percent compound annual growth rate to hit 878 million units by 2030.
Production capacity collides with AI infrastructure
Memory pricing pressures are constraining cellular IoT procurement in 2026. Silicon fabricators are systematically reallocating production capacity away from IoT components toward high-bandwidth memory products intended for AI servers and data centre infrastructure.
Plant managers buying connectivity hardware now face intense price pressure rather than direct component shortages. Operations technology teams planning factory-wide sensor networks must adjust their capital expenditure models to account for this silicon premium.
Advanced 5G modules carry the highest exposure to these market conditions. These units require higher memory density and rely on complex DRAM technologies. This hardware footprint puts them in direct competition with AI supply chains.
Engineers configuring high-speed robotics and real-time video analytics systems bear the brunt of these cost increases. Operations directors deploying 4G LTE modules constructed on legacy memory architectures experience less exposure to current pricing volatility. However, very few product lines escape the pricing pressure completely.
Hardware vendors are enforcing periodic price reviews and writing new contractual mechanisms to manage the fluctuations in component costs. Supply chain directors must revise their fixed-price procurement models to accommodate these floating costs during large-scale sensor rollouts, abandoning predictable bulk purchasing in favour of dynamic pricing agreements.
Vendor consolidation and market share
Five equipment vendors command 73 percent of global revenue in the cellular module market: Quectel, Fibocom, Telit Cinterion, MeiG, and China Mobile IoT.
Volume leadership remains concentrated among China-based vendors Quectel, China Mobile IoT, Sunsea AIoT, Lierda, and Fibocom. These manufacturers benefit heavily from the massive scale of their domestic industrial market. Fleet management companies and logistics providers source millions of these low-cost units to track shipping containers globally.
ZXInfoTek has secured a prominent market position by supplying hardware specifically for point-of-sale terminals. Retail operations directors integrating ZXInfoTek modules secure dedicated hardware pipelines optimised for low-bandwidth financial transactions.
Silicon architecture and network selection
Shipments of cellular IoT chipsets reached 706 million units in 2025, excluding automotive-grade hardware. Six primary manufacturers supply this base hardware: ASR Microelectronics, Qualcomm, Eigencomm, UNISOC, Xinyi, and MediaTek. Enterprise deployment architectures depend entirely on the capabilities of this underlying silicon.
Chinese chipmakers ASR, Eigencomm, and Xinyi recorded high volume growth across LTE Cat-1 bis and NB-IoT architectures. OT teams specify these low-power protocols for stationary environmental monitoring, pipeline pressure sensors, and basic asset tracking networks. Stripping down the silicon footprint preserves field battery life and keeps component costs low.
Qualcomm controls the supply chain for high-bandwidth applications, retaining its market share in LTE-M, high-end 4G LTE, and 5G eMBB chipsets. Heavy industrial applications – such as automated guided vehicles, robotic assembly lines, and real-time machine vision – require this high-end tier.
This performance split forces procurement managers to match specific field requirements against hardware capabilities. Budgets must absorb premium Qualcomm pricing for low-latency robotics while managing increasingly volatile component costs across the broader sensor array.
See also: Supermicro expands edge AI systems for industrial IoT workloads
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