Forget Bluetooth in your phone. Your next Bluetooth device could well be a luggage tracker or a wireless security camera, as shipments of Bluetooth-enabled IoT devices will exceed smartphones within five years.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices will dominate the Bluetooth market by 2024, edging out smartphones in terms of product shipments, according to a report from ABI Research. However, the company states that smartphones will continue to be important for both WiFi and Bluetooth for the foreseeable future.

According to the research firm, by 2024, IoT devices will represent 31% of total Bluetooth device shipments and 27% of total WiFi device shipments, up from 13% and 10%, respectively, in 2018. Key markets for Bluetooth are expected to be in beacons, asset management and personal trackers.

The firm said smartphones will account for just 30% of all Bluetooth-capable devices by 2024. Similarly, the firm said the share of smartphones among shipments of all WiFi devices is also set to fall below 40% by 2024.

Why this matters
ABI believes that IoT will open up the market to a wider range of chipset vendors like Cypress (recently acquired by Infineon), Silicon Labs, Nordic Semiconductor, Dialog Semiconductor, NXP, STMicroelectronics, TI, On Semiconductor, u-blox and others. The firm says that Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek currently dominate the connectivity chipset space thanks to their smartphone market position.

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— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading