According to the official website of China Telecom, the company recently announced that the 2024 consumer IoT card procurement project is now ready for acquisition and is currently open for pre-selection.
The announcement indicates that the procurement scale for China Telecom's 2024 consumer IoT card products is 59 million units. The project does not divide into separate bidding packages. China Telecom stated that the effective period for this pre-selection is six months from the date of the pre-selection announcement, and a selection round will be conducted.
China Telecom procured approximately 165 million IoT cards in 2023, including 120 million consumer IoT cards and 45 million industrial IoT cards. Although the procurement volume for consumer IoT cards this year is not as high as last year, the scale is still significant.
Additionally, last year, both China Broadcasting Network and China Unicom also procured IoT cards on a large scale. The large-scale procurement of IoT cards by major telecom operators indicates that the IoT competition among them has already begun.
In the B2B segment targeting industry enterprises, IoT is rapidly expanding its applications and penetration in fields such as industrial, agricultural, transportation, manufacturing, management, and service sectors.
On the B2C segment targeting individual and household users, the market potential for IoT applications is gradually being unleashed. The current popularity of products/services such as wearable devices and smart home systems already demonstrates a trend of high growth in IoT applications within the personal consumption sector.
Driven by these trends, telecom operators are increasingly focusing on the expansion of IoT.