Customer Experience Driven by Rising Video and Multimedia Collaboration Creates Growth Opportunities for Tabletop Audio
This study captures the market dynamics in the tabletop audio conferencing endpoints market, including the changing trends in the tabletop audio, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the adoption of different types of endpoints as well as the forecast of endpoint revenue and unit shipments until 2026. The trends, forecast, and market shares have been discussed for the TDM/IP and USB audio conferencing endpoint sub-segments. Further, the study identifies the growth opportunities for vendors in the tabletop audio conferencing endpoint market.
In 2019, the total tabletop audio conferencing endpoint market sales reached $406.7 million, increasing 1.2 percent YoY. The USB endpoint sub-segment garnered a good growth of 12.3 percent in revenue terms in 2019 driven by the need for plug-and-play USB endpoints that cater to personal as well as huddle room use cases. On the other hand, the IP endpoint sub-segment faced a lukewarm growth of 0.4 percent attributed to the slowing of the IP endpoint sales experienced by the leading vendors such as Poly, Cisco, Avaya, and Mitel.
Despite the market opportunity for tabletop audio across an estimated 56 million medium to large meeting rooms and 35 million huddle rooms, there is an accelerated move to cloud video conferencing services that has resonated well with the growing demand for integrated audio/video (A/V) bundles. A variety of A/V endpoint options are available today backed by multiple form-factors and a comprehensive suite of video cams, peripherals, and room systems. Today’s distributed workforce shows a strong preference to invest in next-generation meeting room A/V technologies instead of stand-alone tabletop audio endpoints. This trend is impacting the incremental sales from the stand-alone tabletop audio endpoints. The move to cloud video conferencing services and the associated traction for integrated A/V endpoints will continue to dominate in the forecast period.
Accentuated by COVID-19, the personal USB endpoint segment experienced robust growth in H1 2020 to ensure business continuity for remote workers. This personal USB endpoint segment will continue to grow in the near-term to support the growing base of users working from home. Further, higher-priced group USB endpoints will contribute to growth in this segment when the users return to work after COVID-19 has settled down. The IP endpoint segment is facing tremendous pressure in light of COVID as the majority of the businesses have cut down their spending on telecom devices. However, Frost & Sullivan expects that the massive base of cloud users resulting from the pandemic will feed the demand pipeline for IP conference phones especially in the medium and large meeting rooms from mid-2021. Despite a decline due to COVID-19 that has affected the market in 2020, the overall tabletop market growth is expected to partially bounce back in 2021 and register a CAGR of 6.1 percent in the period 2019-2026.
