After a period of weaker demand, the cellular internet of things (IoT) module market returned to strong growth across all major regions in 2025, according to research from specialist IoT analyst Berg Insight.
The research found that annual shipments of cellular IoT modules reached 612 million units in 2025, up 33% from the previous year, with annual sales increasing by 19% to a total of US$5.6bn for the year.
The cellular IoT and LPWA chipset and module market report aimed to provide an overview of the main wide area networking technologies for the IoT market, such as 2G/3G/4G/5G cellular, LoRa and Sigfox, as well as a group of emerging low-power wide area (LPWA) network technologies, including 802.15.4-based protocols, Wirepas Mesh, DECT-2020 NR and Mioty.
The 3GPP family of cellular technologies supports the largest ecosystem in wide area IoT networking. The cellular IoT chipset and module market can be divided into two main segments with distinct supply chains: general IoT solutions and automotive-grade solutions. Data in the study excluded automotive network access device (NAD) modules.
The research found overall that the IoT market was “highly diverse” and divided into multiple ecosystems. By the end of 2025, approximately 4.8 billion devices were connected to wide area networks based on cellular or low-power IoT technologies.
It also fundamentally showed strong prospects for the IoT industry. Shipments of cellular IoT modules until 2030 are forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7% to reach 878 million units. This would mark a turnaround on the prior weak demand, largely due to high inventory levels among technology users, but with notable additional momentum coming from new local policies in select countries such as Spain and China.
The growth has continued into 2026, though Berg warned that challenges related to memory prices are mounting as memory manufacturers increasingly allocate production capacity to high-bandwidth memory products for artificial intelligence (AI) servers and datacentre infrastructure.
The most immediate impact on the module market revealed in the report has been price pressure rather than shortages, with all product segments affected to varying degrees. 5G modules are the most exposed, as these typically have higher memory content and rely on more advanced DRAM technologies, while 4G LTE modules based on legacy memory technologies are less affected.
Nevertheless, stressed Berg, few products are fully protected from the current market situation, which has led module suppliers to introduce periodic price reviews and contractual mechanisms to manage the fluctuations in component costs.
The majority of demand originated from devices deployed in private networks, which remained the dominant deployment model for LoRa networks. The major volume application segments were found to be smart gas and water metering, followed by local area IoT deployments for networking of smart sensors and tracking devices in cities, industrial plants and commercial buildings. Smart home is expected to become a major application area in the coming years, driven by Amazon’s Sidewalk network that is expanding beyond the US.
The five largest cellular module suppliers in the market were revealed as Quectel, Fibocom, Telit Cinterion, MeiG and China Mobile IoT. These held a collective market share of 73% in terms of revenues. The China-based suppliers Quectel, China Mobile IoT, Sunsea AIoT, Lierda and Fibocom, ranked as the volume leaders, were said to be benefiting from the massive scale of the domestic market. The study showed ZXInfoTek has also rapidly emerged as a prominent supplier with what was described as a strong position in the POS terminal segment.
Berg Insight estimates that annual shipments of cellular IoT chipsets, excluding automotive-grade chipsets, amounted to 706 million units in 2025. ASR Microelectronics, Qualcomm, Eigencomm, UNISOC, Xinyi and MediaTek were the main cellular IoT chipset suppliers. China-based players were found to have had a strong year in terms of volume, with ASR, Eigencomm and Xinyi reporting solid LTE Cat-1 bis/NB-IoT growth. Qualcomm retained a substantial share of the LTE-M, high-end 4G LTE and 5G eMBB chipset segments.
