IoT visitors at CES show huge increases in key markets

Steve Rogerson
August 7, 2018

Attendees from key IoT markets at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showed dramatic increases over the previous year, according to the IoT M2M Council (IMC), a trade group that organises a pavilion and conference at CES covering IoT infrastructure.

The show's latest audit indicates that CES visitors interested in automotive and wearables increased by more than 40% over 2017, while visitors interested in healthcare increased a whopping 71%. Even attendees interested in the smart home, appliance and energy sector, thought to be a relatively mature market for CES, increased by 28%.

"The automotive and smart home sectors drew more than 20,000 attendees each, while wearables and healthcare drew over 17,000 and 12,000, respectively," says IMC chairman Syed Z Hosain, who is also CTO for IoT provider Aeris. "These numbers are from the official audit of the Consumer Technology Association, which owns and produces the show, and they are very surprising in a good way. CES has always been a major B2B event for those manufacturing and selling consumer products, and overall attendance was relatively flat, but now it's clear that it has become a major IoT event in its own right."

The IMC will again organise its IoT Infrastructure Pavilion & Conference for CES 2019, and has already surpassed the exhibition space at the 2018 event. The IMC's conference programme will cover topics in connectivity, hardware and software for IoT applications; last year's workshop about developing RFPs for IoT software was one of the event's best attended.

The IoT Infrastructure Pavilion & Conference will again be centred on the Westgate Hotel, directly adjacent to the smart cities and driverless car demonstration areas, giving IoT visitors a destination at the sprawling exhibition.

"CES is one of the rare events where one can see a good cross-section of vertical markets that actually buy and deploy IoT,” said Hosain. “It's often the case that exhibitions billed as IoT events attract mostly vendors. This can also be important, but CES attracts people that are putting technology to use. We like to think that the IMC played a role in increasing the attendance of these markets, and it is absolutely in keeping with the IMC's mission as a technology accelerator."

Next year’s CES will be held from January 8th to 11th, 2019.

The London-based IMC is the largest and fastest-growing trade group dedicated to the global IoT and M2M sector with more than 25,000 rank-and-file members that deploy IoT products and services. IMC board member companies include 1NCE, Aeris, Arrow, Avnet, BICS, Digi, HPE, Intel, Kore, Orbcomm, Micro-Ant, Multi-Tech Systems, Pod M2M, PTC, Re-Teck, Semtech, Sigfox, Tata Communications, Teleena, Telit, U-Blox, Verizon and Vodafone.

• The IMC will hold its annual meeting in Munich this autumn (29 November), with conference sessions that are free to the public. Qualified adopters of IoT technology are invited to an afternoon of panel discussions on crucial technology topics, as well as an evening networking reception. There will be no charge for admission to this event, but registration data will be shared among event sponsors. Seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Details can be found at http://www.iotm2mcouncil.org/agm2018.