WLAN market grew 19.3% YoY in 1Q13

According to International Data Corp. (IDC), the combined consumer and enterprise worldwide wireless local area network (WLAN) market segments registered YoY growth of 12.5 per cent in 1Q13. The enterprise segment continued to grow at a healthy rate of 19.3 per cent over the same period last year. 1Q13 was the thirteenth consecutive quarter with annual growth greater than 15 per cent. Additionally, the consumer WLAN market also started the year 2013 on a relative high note, growing 6.2 per cent YoY, stated the market research firm.

"The explosion of mobile devices and the uptake of enterprise mobility applications continue to be top of mind for enterprise IT in terms of driving WLAN infrastructure growth across a wide range of enterprise verticals and use cases," said Rohit Mehra, VP, network infrastructure at IDC. "While this quarter saw some slowing of growth in Wi-Fi infrastructure rollouts for mobile offload applications, the longer term trend of cellular operators and managed service providers leveraging Wi-Fi stays intact and will continue to boost additional growth in the coming years."

From a geographic perspective, the enterprise WLAN market performed especially well in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) where it increased 36.7 per cent YoY in 1Q13. Within that region, Indonesia recorded the highest YoY growth rate of 550 per cent, with total revenues reaching nearly $15 million in 1Q13. The enterprise market was also fairly strong in Middle East & Africa, in Western Europe, and in the U.S., up 25.1 per cent, 20 per cent and 19.8 per cent, respectively on an annual basis. The performance in other major regions was considerably weaker as Central & Eastern Europe was up low single digits and both Japan and Latin America actually saw low single-digit declines YoY.