Asia Will Lead M2M Deployments and Revenue by 2020

Asia will by 2020 be the foremost region of the world using machine to machine (M2M) technologies, a study sponsored by the GSM association predicts.

“The mobile industry continues to develop at an unprecedented pace and nowhere is this more evident than in Asia, a region that continues to experience tremendous growth and by 2020 will lead the connected devices and M2M market, both in terms of the number of devices and in terms of revenues,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer, GSMA.

Machine to machine services will add up to $22 billion in economic productivity in China by reducing traffic congestion and therefore saving time, for example.

In India, M2M will, by 2017, help power the equivalent of 10 million homes by cutting power theft and improving efficiency. India loses 24 percent of the electricity it generates every year, costing the country $17 billion, with power theft accounting for around half of these losses.

Remote monitoring, disease management, and preventive medicine for the elderly could reduce Japan’s healthcare spend by $10 billion in 2017, and much of that benefit will come from M2M-based health care operations.