NZ telco Spark has released a new three year strategy flagging the NZ IoT market as one of three future growth markets it will focus on, along with digital health and sport.
By FY23 it aims to generate revenue of $NZ80m – $NZ90m from these three markets, and by By 2023 it aims to have on million IoT devices on its networks.
Spark said IoT would play a critical role improving productivity in New Zealand and it estimated the country’s IoT ‘revenue pool’ at $NZ1b by 2024, saying Spark’s network, products and field services would support growth in high value IoT management and support.
Spark CEO Jolie Hodson said the benefit of focussing on a set of core capabilities was that they would pay off immediately in established markets, and position the company to grow in future markets.”
“Our investment in 5G, edge computing and network slicing will open up new opportunities in wireless and will enable smart business solutions beyond connectivity alone,” she said.
“Our end-to-end digital services capability across cloud, security and service management positions us well to accelerate digital transformation as businesses adapt to Covid-19. … We see significant opportunities for growth in IoT, as New Zealand transitions to future ways of working and pursues productivity improvements across all sectors.
“Primarily wireless” and “digitally native”
“Our FY23 aspiration is to be primarily wireless, digitally native and a leading cloud custodian, with 5G and IoT deployed nation-wide, unconstrained capacity, and a top-decile culture defined by its engagement and inclusivity.”
The company’s three year investor strategy update, presented on 16 September contains 31 mentions of IoT. It said the company would have 5G and IoT deployed nationwide by 2023.
The presentation said the need for collaboration and open ecosystems, aided by the emergence of new IoT data standards would drive market growth.
Two days ago the company announced a partnership with the Tech Futures Lab – a private graduate school — to create a Postgraduate Certificate in IoTS.
Headwinds anticipated
By 2023 the company said it aimed to “become the New Zealand IoT platform partner of choice [and] grow end-to-end offering beyond IoT by leveraging strength of existing assets.”
However it acknowledges the plan faces headwinds, citing “inability to get leverage across use cases resulting in having to build bespoke solutions” and the “arrival of large scale international players.”
It intends to mitigate these risks by developing “Proof of concepts with select partners and regular market scanning and forward focussed partnering.”
