Has the IoT industry fully recovered from Covid? Steve Rogerson visited last week’s Electronica show in Munich to find out.

Judging by my conversations at last week’s Electronica trade show in Munich, the IoT industry is in a bit of a strange position. While demand for IoT services has never been higher, and projections are that this demand will just carry on going up for some time, boosted by the increased interest in AI at the edge, sales of various IoT products have slowed a little.

The blame for this lies with Covid. I bet you thought those dark lockdown days were well in the past. Well, in a way they are but their effects are still haunting us. One of these was that the supply shortages Covid created prompted many companies to over-buy when stock became available, not unlike the panic buying we saw in supermarkets for toilet rolls and the like.

As people feel generally that we are now in a more stable place, they have decided it is time to empty those full warehouses and storage areas, and as such are buying less.

“After Covid, there was a focus on the long term,” said Andreas Burghart, senior product manager at Digi (www.digi.com). “They were putting in higher orders than they needed and they are still sitting on all that stock. This means no new orders because they are sitting on inventory. We are seeing that all over the place.”

On the good side, he said there were many new projects being started across the fields notably medical, renewable energy and transportation.

“They are designing-in for the future, so we will see revenue from these in three to four years,” he said.

Milos Gendiar, marketing manager at 2J Antennas (www.2j-antennas.com), has also seen the problem but not to a great extent.

“There are issues with overstocking,” he said, “but it is not affecting us much.”

He was though impressed with the quality of visitors to the show. “It is a good show,” he said. “It is always good for us.” And his colleague business development manager Gary Cunane added: “The show has been very busy. There are lots of manufacturers, lots of engineers, lots of sales people.”

Charlotte Rubin from Quectel (www.quectel.com) agreed. She said: “This is always a super-busy show for us. The design engineers come here and they are the people we work with on a daily basis. They come with new designs they need support for.”

One area Burghart is seeing a lot of interest in is AI.

“There is a lot of stuff coming with AI, especially with computer vision,” he said. “This is new territory for us. We are supporting computer vision applications such as facial recognition, defect detection in manufacturing, and barcode scanning. These are the mid-range applications.”

However, he said for higher-range applications, companies were not necessarily wanting to do things with AI today but seeing it longer term. “They are looking for partners such as us to help with that,” he said.

Florian Denzin, product strategy director at Telit Cinterion (www.telit.com), said there was a lot of interest in newer technologies such as RedCap.

“We are getting more detailed discussions, he said. “A lot of people are asking about RedCap. We are also getting questions on Release 18, which doesn’t exist yet. LTE Cat 1bis is finding its role as a global standard. It is more general than LTE-M. We are seeing very educated customers with specific questions.”

He said visitors liked the show because they had everyone together.

“You can get the whole picture,” he said. “They have antenna makers and all the critical parts of a device in one place.”

So, yes, it was good to see Electronica back to its full strength, having recovered nicely from the pandemic days. Hopefully, the current slowdown will be short lived and be the last effect that lockdown will have on our industry.