How Video Surveillance Products Resist Commercialization

In the first decade of the 21st century, the video surveillance market continued to grow rapidly. IHS has maintained in-depth research on this fast-growing market and witnessed growth of more than 10% per year.

However, the market growth rate in 2013 decreased to 7%, and there are signs that the video surveillance industry is gradually maturing. The mark of a mature market is the standardization of products, the variety of product choices, the improvement of market channels, the fierce price competition, and the shift of manufacturing sites to low-cost areas. Players who later entered the market also appear at this stage, trying to capture market share with a low price strategy. These features more or less reflect the current status of the video surveillance manufacturing market.

The maturation of the market will often bring about the commercialization of products, and recently there have been many discussions about whether video surveillance products are moving towards commercialization. The average price of products has indeed declined rapidly in the past two years. Chinese manufacturers have gained market share from developed country companies with low-priced products. From the standpoint of network cameras alone, they are from 2012 to 2013. The average price dropped by 30%.

IHS believes that although the competition is becoming increasingly fierce, video surveillance products will not become fully commercialized products. The products provided by different suppliers are still different, and in the second decade of the 21st century, the market will still A healthy rate of development. There are five reasons for this view:

Each monitored scene is unique. No single monitoring solution is optimal under any scenario. Many end users are still willing to pay a premium for the solution that best suits them.

Equipment manufacturers still maintain continuous innovation and strive to differentiate their products. In some cases, the differentiation is done in the form of additional software. Sometimes, some novel embedded video analysis technologies also make important contributions to the differentiation.

Brand awareness is always important to end users and installers. In some projects, especially large-scale projects, users are willing to pay more for their familiar and trusted brands. They hope that their video surveillance system will function steadily once security conditions arise.

Although video transmission, the standardization of device interconnection has been very successful, but there are still other standardization requirements for network video surveillance, such as wide dynamic technology and low illumination technology, image stability and bandwidth optimization.

There are still relatively few cameras installed in some regions of the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, IHS expects the ratio of cameras installed in the UK to its number to be at least 1:16, so the UK is largely an equipment renewal market. In many other countries, the ratio of surveillance cameras to population is much smaller, so the growth of cameras is much faster in these countries.

Indeed, the rapid growth in the early days of video surveillance may be over, but as the market still has room for further maturation, higher-speed growth is still expected in the coming years.