Looking for the Next Hot Greenfield Investment in IoT: Look to the Pallets

According to a recent announcement, a new report from IoT analyst firm Berg Insight has ranked connected pallets as the most promising greenfield IoT application that is enabled by the new wave of cellular and non-cellular Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) technologies. Berg Insight has estimated the global installed base of pallets used for transportation at about 10 billion units, the report said.

“With an average sales price of $10 per unit for regular pallets, the cost of adding connectivity can be justified by increasing efficiency in many logistics operations,” said Tobias Ryberg, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight, and author of the report. “The ability to track pallets can also contribute to extending their lifespan which is currently around 2 years.” He added that the possibility of deploying connected pallets is being evaluated by several large industry players right now who might be ready to proceed with large-scale deployments in a very near future.

Smart cities and Smart Agriculture are other potential sources of mass volume market deployments where LPWA technologies could be a key enabler, the authors posited. Berg Insight’s analysts believe, however, that there are significant barriers in each of those that must be overcome before they can scale. Moving from today’s limited smart cities demonstration projects to city-wide deployments will be costly, complex and time-consuming. Smart agriculture is in an even earlier stage of development, where the initial focus lies on proof-of-concept and application prototyping.

“Today’s top IoT devices – the connected car and the smart meter – needed more than a decade to mature,” said Ryberg. “The smart city and the intelligent farm will need at least that much time to grow from vision to reality.”

Download report brochure: Cellular and LPWA IoT Device Ecosystems.

Despite the obstacles, large-scale developing industries like Smart City and Agriculture need buy-in to move forward, and starting with incremental moves, like ubiquitous connected shipping pallets for better supply chain management, seems to make a lot of sense.