eSIM IoT Connections: What Countries Are Leading in 2024?

The growth of eSIMs in the IoT market, specifically for industrial use cases such as connected logistics, has long been regarded as an emerging market beholden to previous industry specifications and standards for IoT and M2M connections; making eSIM profile provisioning and switching extremely difficult and laborious.

However, in May 2023, the GSMA launched SGP.32 – the newest technical specification for eSIM remote provisioning for IoT devices, which enables the remote activation of eSIM profiles via an eIM (eSIM IoT Manager).

With this, we expect a substantial growth in the number of eSIM IoT connections over the next four years: from just 165 million in 2024, to almost 1.3 billion by 2028. However, our latest research notes that guidelines for SGP.32 testing specifications are unlikely to launch until the end of 2024, so much of this growth will occur in 2025 and beyond.

We also anticipate that SGP.42, a new standard expected shortly, will be similarly significant for stakeholders. SGP.42 provides similar functionality as SGP.32, but much like how SGP.32 is tailored for eSIM, SGP.42 will be tailored towards iSIM; a new generation of SIM that is directly integrated into a device’s processor, offering additional flexibility and resource-saving capabilities over traditional SIMs and eSIM.

Source: Global eSIMs & iSIMs Market 2024-2028

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