South and Central America Smart Meters Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecasts (2020 - 2025)
The South and Central America Smart Meters Market is segmented by Product Type (Electricity, Water and Gas), End-User (Industrial, Commercial, Residential), and Country.
ABOUT THIS REPORT
Market Snapshot
Market Overview
Scope of the Report
Key Market Trends
Competitive Landscape
Major Players
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Market Snapshot
Study Period:
2020-2025
Base Year:
2019
CAGR:
21.1 %
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Market Overview
The South and Central America Smart Meters Market is expected to register a CAGR of 21.1% over the forecast period 2020 to 2025. The market is primarily driven by governmental roll-outs for large-scale incorporations, in the absence of which the primary drivers are theft prevention and reduction of other non-technical losses, along with functionality improvements, such as the ability to control utilities remotely and time-based tariffs. However, countries lacking supporting legislation are witnessing slow growth in the market, with the patchy implementation of the technology. This also inhibits these systems from performing at their optimal level.
Mexico and Brazil lead the Latin American region when it comes to the adoption of smart meters. In Brazil, utilities, such as AES Eletropaulo, Eletrobras, Celpa, Light, and others, have experimented with smart meters from pilot-scale projects to multimillion-meter deployments.
In a country, such as Mexico, state-run utility CFE is in the process of converting 30.2 million customers to smart meters by 2025. New markets, such as Columbia, Peru, and Chile, are also expected to witness a demand for smart meters over the forecast period.
The market for smart water meters, however, is in a nascent stage in the region, lacking any large-scale deployments. However, the water scarcity in some nations has led to the initiation of trial phases. According to the estimates by the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF), the water infrastructure demand in Latin America requires an investment of about 0.3% of the GDP until 2030.
The region is characterized by enormous variations in the economic, social and political structures for private investments. This level of privatization is expected to invite foreign investments to adopt smart technology solutions in the water distribution sector in the region.
In March 2020, Esval and Aguas del Valle chose TaKaDu to improve its water network management and protect the water resources of Chilean regions IV and V. The solution is expected to be implemented in 100% of the group's networks, corresponding to about 7,000 km. Currently, nearly 13,000 sensors have been deployed.
This increase in population has caused an increase in the consumption of water. Currently, agriculture accounts for 77% of water consumption; domestic uses account for 13% and industry for 10%. With considerable economic activities and an increasing population, the Mexican residents of northwest, semi-arid, arid north, and central regions use an average of 75 gallons of water a day, which is more than that of a US resident.
In order to encourage renewable energy investment in Mexico, the administration addressed infrastructure bottlenecks. It realized that as power demand grows, the aging transmission lines need to be upgraded to reduce losses. Further, the transmission and distribution losses have been attributed to infrastructure, illegal access, poor metering, and incorrect billing, to name a few.
In line with the country’s Uruguay Digital 2020 Agenda, UTE plans installation project of smart meters in households and companies in the country. As part of the World Day of the Information Society, in May 2019, the company announced its’ commitment to reach 50% of its 1,500,000 customers by the end of 2020.
Additionally, in the mining industry, a significant activity in the region is severly affected from COVID-19 outbreak, leading to suspension of several mining activities, which has negatively affected the maket growth.
Scope of the Report
A smart meter is an electronic machine that reads information such as the consumption of electric energy, current, voltage levels, and power factor. Smart meters transmit the information to the customer for greater accuracy of consumption behavior, and electricity suppliers for system monitoring and customer billing.
By Product Type
Electricity
Water
Gas
By End User
Industrial
Commercial
Residential
Country
Brazil
Mexico
Argentina
Chile
Rest of South and Central America
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Key Market Trends
Electricity is Expected to Register a Significant Growth
Brazil has stringent regulation policies, resulting in a consolidated market. Landis+Gyr and Elster are significant players in the country and are providing high barriers for new entrants. The revenues of the smart meter market are not supposed to follow a similar growth rate, as the growing competition is rising the price pressure on the manufacturers.
Gas Natural Fenosa is one of the major operators in gas and electricity integration, operating in over 30 countries with more than 23 million customers globally. It is one of the main gas distribution operators in Mexico and serves eight states, representing 1.6 million customers. Uruguay’s National Administration of Power Plants and Electrical Transmissions(UTE), is a government-owned power company, which recently announced its commitment toward smart meters
Chile has a national rollout planned, which is expected to significantly boost the smart electricity meter segment in the country. Their incorporation in Ecuador is expected to be fueled by the need to reduce non-technical losses. However, the progress of the market in these countries is slow. The region at large suffers from a lack of funds, and therefore, any prospect of short-term growth of the Latin American market is absent.
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Brazil to Hold a Major Share
The Brazilian government has announced funding worth around USD 200 million for the development of smart grids. It also announced plans to equip smart meters in the whole country by 2021. The aforementioned factors, coupled with Brazil's strong importance on renewable energy generation, are expected to act as driving factors for the Brazilian smart gas meter market.
The country’s National IoT plan launched in April 2019, outlines that IoT technologies deployment would provide great potential to leverage growth in the Brazilian economy. The plan, further, focuses on four core verticals: Healthcare, Smart Cities, Agribusiness, and Manufacturing. New developments will be rolled out by 2022. The government of Brazil expects that IoT-related projects will add USD 132 billion to the economy by 2025.
On a similar note, utilities, such as AES Eletropaulo, Celpa, Eletrobras, and Light, among others have experimented with smart metering, from pilot-scale projects to multimillion-meter deployments. This has opened up a potential opportunity for technology providers to further boost the market growth.
Largest water utilities in Brazil have started focusing on the advanced and automated water meters that enables them to optimize their billing capabilities, manage distribution networks in real-time as well as provide consumers with smart meter data, thereby allowing them to improve their efficiency.
By using Itron’s software-as-a-service smart water solution for real-time management and operation of its water distribution infrastructure, Aguas de Matao is focused on improving services in Matao city in Sao Paulo state.
Back in September 2019, the Department of Water and Sewage (DAE) SĂŁo Paulo announced on results on investments across residential water meters and data platform, in order to reduce water loss and improve visibility into its water system.
The utility held responsible for 80,000 water and sewage connections in the City of Americana, had reported water losses of up to 40% by using Itron’s water meters and Water Operations Management platform as part of a plan to reduce the rate of water loss in its distribution system.
Sabesp, additionally, invested USD 177 million in Q2 2019, with plans to invest a total of BRL 3.5 billion of which BRL 1.66 billion being dedicated to water supply, BRL 1.36 billion on sewage collection and BRL 470 million on sewage treatment-based tech deployment.
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Competitive Landscape
The South and Central American smart meter market is moderately competitive and consists of several major players. In terms of market share, few of the major players currently dominate the market. These major players with prominent shares in the market are focusing on expanding their customer base across foreign countries. These companies are leveraging strategic collaborative initiatives to increase their market shares and profitability. The companies operating in the market are also acquiring start-ups working on smart meter technologies to strengthen their product capabilities.
Jan 2020 - Landis+Gyr launched an Omni-carrier cellular meter and services solution in order to simplify the installation and operation of cellular communications for utility IoT applications. With a single meter model supporting a variety of available cellular carriers, the meter can automatically provision the optimal carrier network on installation and provides increased resilience with automatic failover.