A new report from Kaleido Intelligence has discovered that eSIM connections across consumer and IoT segments will reach 4.5 billion in 2030, up from 500 million in 2024. eSIM use is rapidly gathering traction in smartphones, while 2025 will see the first commercial launches of IoT specification eSIMs, signalling a new era for the technology.
The new research, ‘eSIM Market Outlook & Opportunities 2025’, highlighted how long-awaited SGP.32 (IoT specification) compliant eSIMs will arrive on the market during the latter half of 2025. By 2027, around 50 million SGP.32-compliant eSIMs are forecast to be managed globally.
While the specification represents an important step forward for eSIM in the IoT ecosystem, the growing state of this ecosystem means a long road ahead in terms of testing, interoperability and solutions to lower complexity. Notably, compliance testing will only ensure standard features are interoperable, while the interaction between different OSs, devices and eIMs (eSIM IoT Manager) has yet to be tested on a broad scale.
“SGP.32 makes eSIM possible for all IoT devices, given its architecture and protocol support,” said research author Steffen Sorrell. “But concerns over lock-in and interoperability remain high at this stage. Nevertheless, eSIM will become a de facto choice for IoT connectivity around 2028.”
eSIM traction in the smartphone market is taking significant hold, with activation rates among these devices expected to reach 75% by 2030. Importantly, China’s regulator has recently relaxed rules around eSIM use in domestic smartphones, which will see the first eSIM-enabled devices come to market on a limited basis during Q3 2025, with a national launch envisioned in 2026.
In addition to growing operator support for the technology, eSIM has now found its way into sub-$500 segments, while travel eSIM use has lead to significant Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) transactions among management platform players. While this cements eSIM as the future for consumer connectivity globally, an eSIM-first ecosystem will bring new pressure to maintain underlying systems. Redundancy to ensure service availability as well as tight coupling between active and failover instances will therefore be required. Meanwhile, measures to control potential fraud will become core issues for operators and their suppliers, which will need a greater emphasis on analytics and tooling to detect suspicious behaviour.
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