Asia Pacific market drives digital radio growth

The market for digital radios jumped by 85 percent in 2008 over the previous year, propelled by countries in the Asia/Pacific, region, notably Korea, according In-Stat.

Continued growth this year is expected to lead to significant opportunities for chipmakers, notably Frontier Silicon, NXP Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments. Worldwide, the market for both satellite and terrestrial digital radio, combined, will grow to over 55 million unit shipments in 2012, the analysts say.

"Moving into 2009, developed economies are significantly impacted by the economic turndown. However, developing parts of Asia/Pacific are still experiencing growth in digital radio shipments," said In-Stat analyst Stephanie Ethier. "The reality of the math is that even modest adoption in heavily populous countries such as China and India drives a large impact in global shipments."

One of the factors holding back even faster deployment is the variety of digital radio broadcast standards being deployed, largely on a geographic basis.

Among these are Europe's Eureka 147 (also referred to as digital audio broadcasting (DAB)), iBiquity's IBOC technology, terrestrial integrated services digital broadcasting (ISDB-T), Satellite digital audio radio services (S-DARS), and digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB).

- John Walko
EE Times Europe