According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, the number of active fleet management systems deployed in commercial vehicle fleets in North America was 4.7 million in Q4-2014.
Growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.5%, this number is expected to reach 9.7 million by 2019. In Latin America, the number of active fleet management systems is expected to increase from 2.1 million in Q4-2014, growing at a CAGR of 14.6% to reach 4.1 million in 2019. The top-15 providers of fleet management systems in the Americas now have a combined installed base of more than 3.5 million active units in the region and the top-5 players alone even account for 2 million units.
Leading solution providers including Fleetmatics, Omnitracs, Trimble, Telogis and Zonar Systems now all have more than 300,000 active units on this market. Berg Insight anticipates that the milestone of 1 million fleet management units globally will be surpassed by at least one of the solution providers by 2018.
An emerging trend that has surfaced in recent years includes a diversification among providers of fleet management solutions for commercial vehicles to also support other types of assets. Several solution providers now offer integrated solutions that can be deployed across off-highway vehicles, non-powered assets and other non-vehicle fleets in addition to the commercial vehicle types traditionally targeted by FM providers.
“This enables fleet owners to monitor and manage all of their business-critical assets through the same backoffice interface, using familiar applications and reporting tools”, said Rickard Andersson, senior analyst, Berg Insight. He adds that this development at the same time enables fleet telematics providers to maintain subscriber growth as mature markets eventually approach peak penetration.
“The telematics penetration is for example already comparably high in the heavy truck and trailer segment in North America, but the same cannot be said about most other types of assets used by fleet-owning companies.”, said Mr. Andersson. He concludes that asset tracking thus represents a heavily under penetrated market with considerable potential for telematics providers that are ready to diversify the product offering. Many other players active in the general fields of Big Data and the Internet of Things may also start eyeing this market.
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