Smart cities technology market will be worth US$ 820.7 billion by 2025

As cities get smarter, they become more livable and more responsive – and today we are seeing just a preview of what technology can eventually do in the urban environment. Two recent studies describe the prospects for this market in the coming years.

In Markets & Markets’ projections, the global smart city market is projected to grow from $410.8 billion in 2020 to $820.7 billion in 2025, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.8%. In the opinion of the company’s analysts, the biggest driver will be the Public Safety area. Technologies such as video surveillance, real-time DNA and number plate phenotyping, and facial recognition are widely used by police forces to ensure the safety of citizens.

According to Market & Markets smart city technology providers can expect steady adoption of solutions for various areas such as smart transportation (accounting for the largest share of this market in 2020), smart public services, smart buildings, and smart citizen services. The need for innovative smart city solutions, which can be effectively combined with IoT, Big Data, Analytics, cloud, security, and network connectivity, are increasing in these application areas.

Privacy and security are the main areas of concern in smart city projects. As the ecosystem mainly relies on IoT and central access points for diverse data, the vulnerability of the whole ecosystem is high. To solve privacy and security challenges in smart cities, stakeholders (security professionals and smart city planners) must address the issues holistically to ensure that the challenges do not continue to affect the rest of the smart grid.

Another study outlined the top five technologies used in smart cities: street lighting, parking, waste collection, air quality monitoring and surveillance.

According to Bern Insight, some figures found by the survey at the end of 2020 considering the global installed base (excluding China) are:

• Individually controlled track lighting: 13.0 million units;
• Parking sensors: 957,000 units (floor- or surface-mounted occupancy detection sensors);
• Waste collection sensors: 657,000 points (fill level sensors pre-integrated into bins and containers or retrofitted into existing collection points);
• Air quality monitoring systems: 73,000 units;
• Smart city surveillance equipment: Market valued at €9.9 billion.

According to the study, the intelligent street lighting market should gain steam and expand its installed base at a significant compound annual growth rate of 23.4%, totaling 37.4 million units in 2025. The intelligent parking sensors sector, on the other hand, should show a slightly lower growth of 21.6%, while the waste collection sensor technologies segment will have the highest growth of the three, with a rate of 29.8%.

The technology that is gaining space more recently is that of non-regulatory monitoring of air quality in cities, with increasingly smaller and lower-cost devices that can serve as complements to the current official monitoring stations. The number of such sensors is expected to reach 315,000 units by 2025, with a growth rate of 34%, according to the study. Reasons highlighted by the research for the growing interest in this type of solution were the news about possible links between air pollution and Covid-19, as well as the record forest fire seasons in the United States and Australia. The study also points out that there are still no standards or certifications for non-regulatory air quality monitoring devices.

The largest of the five technology areas for smart cities continues to be surveillance solutions, with fixed and mobile audio and video systems. The global market is expected to grow at a rate of 19.7% during the study period.