A Japanese Perspective on IoT – Opportunities and Challenges
A Japanese Market Research Said Cybersecurity will be A Big Challenge of IoT’s Rapid Growth.
“A lot of companies in the IoT space are growing quickly, and they are more concerned with getting their products to market than ensuring customers’ data is safe or their own security infrastructures are dependable. Some hackers have taken advantage of IoT devices that are connected to a company’s WiFi network, and they have been able to hack into corporate infrastructures without any physical access.” (LinkLab)
On January 20, 2016, MM Research Institute, a Japanese market trend research consultant, published a 2019 Japanese IoT market size forecasting report based on the 2014 base year data.
MM Research Institute conducted a web-based survey for 4,299 Japanese companies covering almost all industries in Japan. The survey period is from November 20 to 25, 2015.
According to the survey, The Japanese IoT market size has reached 293 billion yen (2.7 billion US Dollars) in 2015, increase from 173.3 billion yen (1.6 billion US Dollars) in 2014. It will continue to expand with cost improvement and add-value products. It is expected to reach 715.9 yen (6.6 billion US Dollars) in 2019. The average annual growth rate is about 32.8%.
The annual growth for different sectors are:
- Application development and operation – 28%
- IoT platform/system construction and operation – 24%
- Network/Connectivity – 19%
- Sensors/devices – 17%
In addition, 469 (about 10.9% of respondents) companies said that they have adopted IoT in their business. The percentages of IoT adoption in different sectors are:
- The manufacturing industry – 33.0%
- Service industry – 13.4%
- Information and communications industry – 12.2%
For manufacturing, the main reasons to adopt IoT from the respondents’ perspective are to improve:
- production efficiency;
- the quality of the product; and
- activities that have been working in the production site.
On the other hand, the survey results also show respondents’ concerns on IoT:
- Anxiety (33.1%) of information leakage and cyber attacks
- Operating costs (26.6%)
- Efficiency of the system construction and management services (25.4%)
Most companies who adopt IoT had cybersecurity concerns. Those companies worried about their production equipment, machinery, facilities, and products which connect to the network will open a door for cyber attacks. They said the future efforts will be focused more on network security measures and advancement.
