Transforma Insights, the world’s leading IoT analyst firm publishes its annual snapshot of the IoT market worldwide, based on the most exhaustive and granular market forecasts available.
Transforma Insights’ IoT forecasts have long been established as the ‘gold standard’ for quantification of the IoT market, being based on rigorously researched analysis of hundreds of different applications on a country-by-country basis. The IoT Forecast Database is updated on a rolling basis throughout the year with new analysis of the various component use cases being published on a weekly basis. Every year, the team steps back to take a consolidated view of the quantitative status of IoT today and prognosis for the next decade.
The key highlights are:
At the end of 2025 there were 21 billion IoT devices active globally. By 2035 that figure will have risen to 48 billion, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9%. Unit sales, our measure of the number of shipments in the year, will rise from 5 billion in 2025 to 10.4 billion in 2035 (8% CAGR).
As ever, short range technologies, such as WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee, dominate IoT, accounting for 79%-80% of connections throughout the forecast period. Cellular’s share of the IoT market will grow from 11.3% to 14.1% (in absolute numbers equating to growth from 2.4 billion to 6.8 billion), driven in large part by increasing low power deployments. This is also matched by the growing importance of other non-cellular low power wide area (LPWA) technologies, of which LoRaWAN is the most prominent example; these technologies will grow from 0.5 billion in 2025 (2.4% of all IoT devices) to 2 billion (4.2%) in 2035. Meanwhile, satellite will grow significantly as a proportion of connections, although with only modest total volumes, growing from 0.05% to 0.1% of IoT connections, a CAGR of 17%.
Within the cellular figures, the most prominent trends will be the migration over the period from 4G to 5G, and the increasing prominence of the ‘mMTC’ technologies. By 2035 over 90% of cellular shipments will be accounted for by 5G, including the NB-IoT and LTE-M technologies that have been co-opted into the 5G standard. Almost two-thirds of shipments will fall under the ‘5G mMTC’ umbrella, which includes those aforementioned technologies plus evolutions of RedCap within the 5G standard.
By our measure of revenue – which incorporates hardware module, connectivity and ‘service wrap’ (i.e. the actual application supported by the IoT connection) – IoT will generate USD866 billion in 2035, up from USD368 billion in 2025, a CAGR of 10%. Cellular connectivity revenue as a part of that will grow from USD13.8 billion to USD25 billion.
There is quite pronounced regional variation to the forecasts. Notably China accounts for 35% of all IoT connections overall, but 54% of cellular connections and just over 70% of mMTC connections. By 2035 the rest of the world will have caught up somewhat in terms of cellular; while the share of all IoT will be unchanged, its share of cellular and mMTC will have declined to 43% and 49% respectively. North America and Europe each account for 20%-21% of the global market throughout the forecast period.
One of the great assets of Transforma Insights’ forecasts is the granularity of the numbers, being based on analysis of over 250 different applications. This allows us to dig into the key growth use cases. The most prominent trend is that IoT is dominated by consumer devices, accounting for almost 60% of installed devices in 2025, declining slightly to 56% in 2035.
By 2035, the biggest IoT application groups by volume of installed devices will be Inventory Management (particularly Electronic Shelf Labels) and AV Equipment (including connected TVs and smart speakers), with over 6 billion connected devices. Other major application groups, each accounting for over 3 billion devices, are Personal Portable Electronics, Building Automation and Building Lighting.
In revenue terms, the make-up is rather different as it tends to more reflect those use cases where there is recurring revenue, rather than one-off predominantly consumer sales. The biggest five application groups in revenue terms are Building Automation, Building Safety & Security, Vehicle Head Unit (i.e. factory fit connected cars), Payment Processing and CCTV.
Join us on the 14th May for our annual IoT forecast webinar
On the 14th May 2026 we will run a free webinar delving into all aspects of our IoT forecasts, covering the areas discussed above (and much more) in more detail. Join our leading IoT experts Matt Arnott, Jim Morrish and Matt Hatton to learn more.
Register here: Webinar – Transforma Insights’ annual global IoT market forecast update
