ARtillery Intelligence released a new report that projects mobile AR annual revenue to grow from $6.87 billion in 2020 to $26.05 billion in 2025, a 30.5 percent compound annual growth rate. Entitled Mobile AR Global Revenue Forecast, 2020-2025, it dives deep on mobile AR revenue totals and subcategories – including consumer and enterprise spending.
Enterprise productivity is the leading revenue category in 2021 ($3.12 billion), followed by AR ad placement ($1.98 billion) and consumer in-app purchases ($1.89 billion). The latter comes mostly from player spending in Pokémon Go. Ad placement will be the leading mobile AR revenue category by 2025 ($6.68 billion) as brands continue to recognize AR’s ability to demonstrate products in visually immersive and conversion-boosting ways. AR commerce-enablement software will be driven by similar factors.
“Several of these mobile AR revenue categories represent what we call AR as a Service, which are SaaS-like AR offerings that enable companies to build AR experiences,” said ARtillery Intelligence Chief Analyst, Mike Boland. “Those experiences can be visually-guided productivity in enterprise settings, or consumer-facing experiences — an area we call B2B2C. In either case, these AR ‘picks & shovels’ will represent a large opportunity to meet demand for democratized experience creation and accelerate time-to-market.”
As is the case across the global economy, mobile AR sub-sectors have been impacted unevenly by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Given that software and digital products fared well in global lockdowns, the impact on mobile AR has been mostly positive. For example, quarantine-friendly consumer AR such as product visualization has inflected in the past year; while post-Covid hybrid work environments will compel enterprise remote-AR support.
“Covid-era dynamics will have a net-positive impact as sheltered-in entertainment, visually-enhanced shopping and socially-distanced productivity played to AR’s strengths,” said Boland. “This means that Covid-accelerated adoption and digital transformation over the past year have exposed the technology, thereby accelerating its longer-term sustained adoption. Mobile AR will have a key role in the post-Covid world”
Report Availability
Mobile AR Global Revenue Forecast, 2020-2025 is available to ARtillery PRO subscribers, and more can be previewed here. This report follows ARtillery Intelligence’s separate examination of headworn AR and VR spending.
