Worldwide WLAN Market Shows Continued Strong Performance in First Quarter of 2013, According to IDC

The first quarter of 2013 was the thirteenth consecutive quarter with annual growth greater than 15%. The consumer WLAN market also started the year 2013 on a relative high note, growing 6.2% year over year.

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, Vice President, 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% year over year in 1Q13. Within that region, Indonesia recorded the highest year-over-year growth rate of 550%, with total revenues reaching nearly $15 million in 1Q13. The enterprise market was also fairly strong in Middle East & Africa (MEA), in Western Europe, and in the United States, up 25.1%, 20.0%, and 19.8% respectively on an annual basis. The performance in other major regions was considerably weaker as Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) was up low single digits and both Japan and Latin America actually saw low single-digit declines year over year.

Although there was significant regional and country level variance in terms of WLAN market growth in 1Q13, the worldwide outlook for enterprise, service provider, and consumer segments remains very positive as vendors and end-users start to prepare for the next technology upgrade cycle, said Petr Jirovsky, Senior Research Analyst, Worldwide Networking Trackers Group.

Key Enterprise WLAN Vendor Highlights

-Cisco's 1Q13 worldwide enterprise WLAN revenue grew a strong 23.4% year over year, reaching $510 million in the quarter. The North American market accounted for 48.8% of Cisco's worldwide enterprise WLAN revenue in 1Q13. Cisco's worldwide market share stands at 52.9% in 1Q13, its highest share since 4Q10.

-Aruba (excluding its OEM business) grew its enterprise revenue 8.5% year over year in 1Q13, which was below the overall market. As a result, Aruba now holds 10.5% of the enterprise WLAN market, down from 11.5% in 1Q12.

-HP's overall enterprise WLAN revenue increased 12.4% year over year in 1Q13, a notable improvement in annual growth compared to HP's results for the last few quarters. As a result, HP's market share increased slightly to 5.4% in 1Q13, up from 5.1% in 1Q12.

-Ruckus grew a solid 24.0% year over year in 1Q13, well above the overall market, although this does reflect noticeable deceleration of year-over-year growth for Ruckus compared to previous quarters.

The IDC Worldwide Quarterly WLAN Tracker provides total market size and vendors share data in an easy-to-use Excel Pivot Table format. The geographic coverage includes eight major regions (USA, Canada, Latin America, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan), Japan, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa) and 58 countries. The WLAN market is further segmented by product class, product type, product, standard, and location. Measurement for the WLAN market is provided in factory revenue, customer revenue, and unit shipments.