What data says about CES 2020

Even spending four days at Las Vegas, it was absolutely impossible to visit the 4500 exhibitors of the show to learn about their solutions. So I've decided to take a different angle and to adopt a data centric approach of CES 2020 to extract trends and insights. It was painful, but I have listed all exhibitors per category to extract some key takeaways for the high-tech market in 2020 (or at least for the hype). 

I have distinguished 2 kind of companies - market centric vs supporting technology:

• The one providing a supporting technologies/services that can be used across different markets. These are usually B2B based company that sell to companies designing products for specific vertical markets.
• The one focused on a specific market and providing products and services for end customers in that market.

Important limitations on the datas:

• Total number of exhibitors claimed by CES is 4500. As you’ll see below, the total makes 12254 companies, that means that companies are in average into 3 categories.  That doesn’t change statistically the big trends, but that means the absolute numbers are not accurate. 
• Defining categories is always a risky exercise as you need to make contestable choices and take assumption. Please don’t nitpick on each category, I took the one from official CES website ;-) 

Raw data

Here is the detailed count of exhibitors per category, and the weight they represent in the global picture: 

What do we learn from that? 

Market Hype

The TOP (representing more than 4% exhibitors) is:

1. Smart home (#1 by far with 1095 exhibitors)
2. Wearables
3. Vehicle technology
4. Lifestyle
5. Digital health
6. Smart cities

That is pretty much in line with what I saw in the show, with the most advanced and meaningful use case. That is as well what we observe at Witekio on the B2C segment, we have a lot of ongoing project on these verticals.

Tech Hype

In terms of technology hype, the TOP (representing more than 4% exhibitors) is:

1. Wireless devices (#1 by far with 1241 exhibitors)
2. Software and apps (still in the race after 20 years)
3. Artificial intelligence and edge AI (what a surprise)
4. Sensors and biometrics

Death Valley

Drone, 3D printing, and AR/VR that were at the top of the hype now seem to enter into the Death Valley (cf. hype cycle from Gartner). I am not even naming big data, blockchain, and IoT platforms that have just disappeared from the categories. It is both a sign of maturity - they are now spread across different market into real use cases - and of accuracy of the hype cycle that anticipate that journey for all tech hypes.

Another remarkable info is the number of technologies / solutions that aim at making a more resilient and sustainable world: 0,28% for the first, 1,54% for the second. It can be considered as a major disappointment from my point of view, maybe the trend is growing and next years these will be in the TOP. Based on the mindset of the show and the positioning, I am unsure. I’ll give a more detailed opinion on that topic and on the future of the show in another article.

What about you?

What do you think about these insights? Any particular data you would like to dig-in?