In the last year or two, UWB technology has developed from an unknown niche technology into a big market hot spot, and many people want to flood into this field in order to share a slice of the market cake.
But what is the state of the UWB market? What new trends are emerging in the industry?
Trend 1: UWB Solution Vendors are Looking at More Technology Solutions
Compared with two years ago, we found that many manufacturers of UWB solutions not only focus on UWB technology, but also make more technical reserves, such as Bluetooth AoA or other wireless communication technology solutions.
Because scheme, this link is closely combined with application side, many times the company’s solutions are based on the needs of users to develop, in actual applications, will inevitably encounter some can’t solve using only UWB requirements, need to use to other techniques, so the scheme of the chamber of commerce technology based on its advantages, the development of other business.
Trend 2: The Enterprise Business of UWB is Gradually Differentiated
On the one hand is to do subtraction, so that the product is more standardized; On the one hand, we do addition to make the solution more complicated.
A few years ago, UWB solution vendors mainly made UWB base stations, tags, software systems and other UWB related products, but now, the enterprise play began to divide.
On the one hand, it makes subtraction to make products or programs more standardized. For example, in b-end scenarios such as factories, hospitals and coal mines, many enterprises provide a standardized module product, which is more acceptable to customers. For example, many enterprises are also trying to optimize the installation steps of products, reduce the threshold of use, and allow users to deploy UWB base stations by themselves, which is also a kind of standardization.
Standardization has many advantages. For solution providers themselves, it can reduce the input of installation and deployment, and also make products replicable. For users (often integrators), they can make higher customization functions based on their understanding of the industry.
On the other hand, we also found that some enterprises choose to do addition. In addition to providing UWB related hardware and software, they will also do more solution integration based on user needs.
For example, in a factory, in addition to the needs of positioning, there are also more needs such as video monitoring, temperature and humidity detection, gas detection and so on. UWB solution will take over this project as a whole.
The benefits of this approach are higher revenue for UWB solution providers and greater engagement with customers.
Trend 3: There are More and More Homegrown UWB Chips, but Their Main Opportunity Is in the Smart Hardware Market
For UWB chip companies, the target market can be divided into three categories, namely B-end IoT market, mobile phone market and intelligent hardware market. In recent two years, more and more domestic UWB chip enterprises, the biggest selling point of domestic chips is cost-effective.
On B-end market , chip makers would distinguish between C-end market, redefine a chip, but the market B chip shipments is not very big, some modules of chip vendors will provide higher value-added products, and side B products for chip price sensitivity is lower, also pay more attention to stability and performance, a lot of times they don’t replace chips just because they’re cheaper.
However, in the mobile phone market, due to the large volume and high performance requirements, major chip manufacturers with verified products are generally given priority. Therefore, the biggest opportunity for domestic UWB chip manufacturers is in the intelligent hardware market, because of the large potential volume and high price sensitivity of the intelligent hardware market, domestic chips are very advantageous.
Trend 4: Multi-mode “UWB+X” Products Will Gradually Increase
No matter the demand of B end or C end, it is difficult to fully meet the demand only using UWB technology in many cases. Therefore, more and more “UWB+X” multi-mode products will appear in the market.
For example, the solution based on UWB positioning + sensor can monitor mobile people or objects in real time based on sensor data. For example, Apple’s Airtag is actually a solution based on Bluetooth +UWB. UWB is used for accurate positioning and ranging, and Bluetooth is used for wake up transmission.
Trend 5: Enterprise UWB Mega-projects are Getting Bigger and Bigger
Two years ago, when we research found that UWB million-dollar projects are few, and capable of achieving the five million level is a handful, in this year’s survey, we found that the million-dollar projects increased obviously, the larger plan, every year there are a certain number of millions of project, even being project began to emerge.
On the one hand, the value of UWB is more and more recognized by users. On the other hand, the price of UWB solution is reduced, which makes customers more and more accepted.
Trend 6: Beacon Solutions Based on UWB are Becoming Increasingly Popular
In the latest survey, we found that there are some UWB based Beacon schemes in the market, which are similar to Bluetooth Beacon schemes. The UWB base station is lightweight and standardized, so as to reduce the cost of base station and make it easier to lay out, while the tag side requires higher computing power. In the project, If the number of base stations is greater than the number of tags, this approach can be cost-effective.
Trend 7: UWB Enterprises are Gaining More and More Capital Recognition
In recent years, there have been a number of investment and financing events in the UWB circle. Of course, the most important one is at the chip level, because chip is the beginning of the industry, and combined with the current hot chip industry, it directly promotes a number of investment and financing events in the chip field.
Mainstream solution providers at the B-end also have a number of investment and financing events. They are deeply engaged in a certain segment of the B-end field and have formed a high market threshold, which will be more popular in the capital market. While the C-end market, which is still to be developed, will also be the focus of the capital market in the future.
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