Smart Cities Global Market To Reach $1,266B by 2019
The changes in social structure and economics have always influence our movement and more so in our modern society. This has lead to strain on certain resources in certain areas prompting the need to better manage these resources with smarter technologies, leading to the creation of smart cities. The building of smart cities such as Songdo, South Korea and Living PlanIT, Portugal are proof of how a city’s resources and infrastructure can be connected to support a cohesive lifestyle, between people and their environment.
In a recent report by MarketsandMarkets they highlighted the different categories of the smart city such as Building Automation, Energy Management, Smart Education, Smart Water, Industrial Automation, Smart Healthcare, Smart Home, Smart Transportation and Smart Security that are converging into creating today’s and tomorrow’s smart cities. They also thinks that the global smart cities market is expected to grow from $654.57 billion in 2014 to $1,266.58 billion by 2019, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.1%.
The cost of some of these technologies such as semiconductors are lowering the cost of implementation of these solutions, making it easier to connected these different categories on a wider scale; for example the smart home can now connect to the utility provider via smart meter, enabling better energy management. Also, new wireless network and automation technologies like ZigBee, Z-Wave and Insteon are improving the M2M (Machine-to-Machine) across the different services.
Base on the study done by MarketsandMarkets, the smart cities market is expected to grow at a rapid pace in the regional markets of APAC (Asian Pacific) and MEA (Middle East and Africa). These regions would also be the highest revenue generating markets. Considerable growth is expected in the North America and European smart cities markets.
The sector is not without its challenges such as a lack of standardisation to facilitate easy integration and faster implementation. Another is, it is not possible to build new smart cities to re-house everyone and neglect established urban areas, government and business need to modernise the infrastructure in these established cities, and this is while services are needed 24 hours a day.