In June Transforma Insights published an update on its IoT MVNO market landscape report first published in November 2021 and revised in December 2023. The new report includes profiles of 234 MVNOs (up from 188 previously) around the world, and analysis of some of the key trends that come through from the research.
One of the data points we collected during the research was number of employees, based on LinkedIn data, with a view that this would provide some pointers on the health of the IoT MVNO space.
Considering those companies included in both this and the previous iteration of the research in 2023, according to LinkedIn data, the number of employees grew by 11%. The lion’s share of employees was accounted for by companies where we assume that less than 50% of revenue came from cellular IoT connectivity, however, including the likes of Itron, Digi-Key and Syniverse. Given that these are not predominantly IoT connectivity providers we can exclude them from considerations of employee trends.
Considering only those companies that provide IoT connectivity and with greater than 50% of revenue coming from cellular connectivity, employee growth was up 17%. Included in this figure are companies such as Telit Cinterion where most of the revenue comes from hardware. Amongst those companies that make most of their revenue from hardware, employee count was down 2%, whereas for those where the focus is predominantly or exclusively on selling connectivity, which is ultimately the core of the IoT MVNO space, the growth was 24%.
Considering company size, there was very little variation. IoT MVNOs (i.e. those with most revenue coming from cellular-based IoT connectivity and a minority of that from hardware), those companies with more than 100 employees grew slightly faster (26%) than those with up to 100 (23%). Essentially size of organisation made no difference to employee growth rates.
We should note of course that a few companies have ceased trading and therefore have had a headcount reduction, but none of those had a large employee base, so the impact is modest.
Prima facie evidence is that the IoT MVNO market is in good health, other than those companies that predominantly focus on hardware, where it is almost certainly the hardware part of the business that is influencing the numbers.
