CES now a key B2B IoT forum: Six themes from the 2024 show

by David Gearhart, CFA , Howard Smith and Charles M.

CES 2024 featured an abundance of telematics hardware providers, video telematics solution providers, hardware-agnostic end-to-end IoT solutions and many more types of B2B IoT companies. We expect CES to continue to rise in prominence as the most productive trade forum for B2B IoT companies.

Based on our meetings and our observations on the show floor, we identified key themes for B2B IoT in six areas: artificial intelligence, energy harvesting technology, cameras, hardware strategies, sensor fusion, and robotics.

We discuss each of these areas and highlight relevant companies.

Table of contents

• CES increasingly preferred over MWC
• AI everywhere, as expected
• Energy harvesting for indoor applications a major coming trend
• Camera solutions in abundance, including computer vision; bodycams of interest to vendors to differentiate offerings
• Hardware agnostic solutions becoming more common; potential to become norm in some markets
• Sensor fusion a reasonable approach to differentiate, likely to become common
• Smaller designs, creative business models suggest wider robotics adoption on horizon
• Looking ahead to future CES shows
• IoT index strength broadens slightly
• IoT M&A: Notable transactions include MiX Telematics, IPVideo and Cubic Telecom
• IoT private placements: Notable transactions include BusPatrol, Utility and Terminal

CES increasingly preferred over MWC

We recently attended CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show. While we’ve attended from time to time in previous years, we historically hadn’t viewed CES as a prime Internet of Things forum for us, in large part because its broad consumer technology roots made it a challenging place in which to pursue our narrower focus on business-to-business (B2B) IoT. However, that has changed. Devices of all sorts have, over time, increasingly incorporated wireless connectivity, making the show inherently more relevant for IoT enablers and vendors. Further, B2B IoT companies increasingly prefer CES to the incumbent IoT forum, MWC (formerly Mobile World Congress), due to CES’s central location in Las Vegas (with lower travel costs) and high number of relevant professional and company attendees.

Indeed, despite the diversity of business models and technologies represented at CES outside of B2B IoT, we were able to meet with dozens of B2B IoT companies, counting both exhibitors and those just attending, across the IoT value chain. They ranged in focus from hardware to network connectivity to software, encompassing both point and end-to-end solution providers and a wide range of vertical markets and use cases. CES 2024 proved to be abundant with telematics hardware providers, video telematics solution providers, hardware-agnostic end-to-end IoT solutions and many more types of B2B IoT companies. We expect CES to continue to rise in prominence as the most productive forum for B2B IoT companies.

Based on our meetings and our observations on the show floor, we identified six key themes for B2B IoT. We discuss them briefly below and plan to explore one or two of them in detail in future reports.

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