London, United Kingdom - 14 Dec 2015 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are finally set to hit the mainstream in 2016, following a strong 2015 third quarter in shipment data and contract figures. Through its new research area, BLE Beacon Technologies and Services, ABI Research , a leader in technology market intelligence, tracks the BLE beacon contract and shipment data across more than 20 verticals.

Read ABI Research’s BLE Beacon Technologies, Applications and Revenues report.

“ABI Research populated its contract tracker with a handful of impactful names in the last quarter, including IKEA, H&M, Macy’s, Target, Pizza Hut, Elle, Espirit, McDonalds and Carrefour,” says Patrick Connolly, Principal Analyst at ABI Research. “Meanwhile, companies like Groupon, Facebook and Google are starting to bring their SME beacon strategies to market. Adoption is now across the retail board with really strong interest from the Quick Serve Restaurants (QSR), as well as banking sectors.”

Additionally, the Out of Home (OOH) advertising market is showing rapid expansion, with the first major deployments in Europe. Currently, Strӧer is announcing plans for 50,000 deployments in Germany, with Exterion Media following suit in Holland and the UK.

“India is also a recent market adopter, with InteractionOne deploying a 1,000 beacon network,” continues Connolly. “We are also seeing some very large asset tracking contracts for BLE beacons in industrial, vending, hospital and airport market sectors.”

Research data shows that, from a beacon shipment perspective, most vendors are shipping multiple contracts in the tens of thousands. This is a major upgrade from 2014, indicating that a lot of retailers are ramping up to deploy in 2016. Although not public yet, several original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) completed funding rounds, which will enable them to scale in 2016. As ABI Research correctly predicted in August 2015, Sensoro is emerging as a major market player, with more than 110,000 beacons deployed in China and some major orders lined up for 2016.

“Interestingly, vendors have not seen significant demand for Eddystone as of yet, with many waiting for Google to reveal its hand, as well as for the arrival of dual iBeacon/Eddystone solutions,” concludes Connolly. “Most OEMs are working on solving the latter by incorporating power efficient solutions and/or including two batteries. Google’s new Web Bluetooth API may also help to drive adoption in 2016”.

These findings are part of ABI Research’s new BLE Beacon Technologies and Services, which includes research reports, market data, insights and competitive assessments.