In the News

Water is probably the most important and overly used global natural resource. According to a report from the World Resource Institute, about one-quarter of the world’s population, spread across 17 countries, faces extremely high level of water stress and by 2040, it is most likely that 1 in 4 children will be living in areas of extremely high water stress. Water conservation has become one of the direst needs today and the biggest challenge for utilities in the water sector.

The IoT hardware market has, suddenly, shrunk – in order to expand, and to rebalance the western power-play. So say market watchers, reacting to the twin acquisitions this week by US-based chipmaker and Semtech, which has confirmed a deal to splurge $1.2 billion on Canadian outfit Sierra Wireless, and Italian-American IoT module maker Telit, which has agreed a share-exchange for the IoT assets of French industrial firm Thales.

The latest iteration of the 3GPP standards for mobile communications, Release 17, includes a new variant of 5G aimed specifically at IoT.

There were two high profile pieces of M&A news in the IoT hardware space in the last week. First up, on Friday 29th July, Telit and Thales announced that they were combining the assets of Telit with those of Thales’ IoT hardware business into Telit Cinterion. That was followed on 2nd August by the news that Semtech Corporation would acquire Sierra Wireless.

French defence giant Thales has announced the sale of its mobile network-based Internet of Things (IoT) business, Cinterion, to US rival Telit. The division makes the ‘things’ in IoT such as gateways, modem cards and other modules and it supports all ‘internets’, from 5G and LTE, through NB-IoT to GPS and GLONASS.

US-based IoT specialist Telit looks set to take a bigger slice of the European market. Late last week it agreed to acquire French defence giant Thales’ cellular IoT business. The division offers a range of modules, gateways and modem cards. Sold under the Cinterion brand, they support 5G, LTE, NB-IoT and LTE-M, as well as GPS and GLONASS positioning technologies. It boasts 550 employees spread across 23 countries, and last year it turned over €300 million.

Enterprises are increasingly focusing attention on ESG (Environmental, Social and Governmental) goals as a mechanism for improving their perception amongst investors, employees and other stakeholders. A key part relates to sustainability and the reduction of the organisation’s environmental impact. The application of new technologies, particularly the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, can have a significant impact on reducing an organisation’s carbon footprint, both directly through lower hydrocarbon fuel use and through reducing electricity consumption, say Matt Hatton, founding partner and Suruchi Dhingra, research manager of Transforma Insights.

The war in Ukraine is being fought through many unconventional means. One of the most prominent relates to energy supply and dependence. In 2021, about two-fifths of the gas that Europeans burned came from Russia. The war has boosted already high prices of oil and gas globally and several countries have further reduced gas imports from Russia. Under the same stance, the European Union member countries urgently plan to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels and switch to other renewable sources for electricity generation.

The LoRa Alliance’s LoRaWAN World Expo took place on 6th and 7th July in Paris. This is the event that was initially scheduled for June 2020 but suffered from delays due to Covid. Apparently 1,200 registered for the conference and actual attendance was a little over 1,000. So, what was interesting at the LoRaWAN World Expo 2022?

The IoT technology landscape is increasingly being defined by its ability to address large numbers of devices in increasingly inhospitable environments by virtue of slimming down the features and functionality of the offering to make it more appropriate. Last year, we at Transforma Insights published a report on what we termed the ‘Thin IoT stack’. The report examined the arrival of a set of technologies across the IoT stack that are specifically aimed at coping with dealing with the constraints of power, location, space, processing and several other factors that will be increasingly common in a large volume of IoT deployments. The implications of this shift will be felt widely across all aspects of how IoT is deployed, says Matt Hatton, founding partner, Transforma Insights.