The worldwide digital radio market has been growing, as most of you know. But most of you probably don’t know which markets are growing at the fastest rates. Between 2007 and 2008 digital radio experienced growth of 85%, as reported by http://www.in-stat.com/, which is a tremendous increase in just one year. Asia/Pacific was the main reason for this large growth, with Korea actually being the main factor. After the strong growth in 2008, what should we expect for 2009? Of course there’s been studies suggesting exponential growth, but according to In-Stat:
“Moving into 2009, developed economies are significantly impacted by the economic turndown. However, developing parts of Asia/Pacific are still experiencing growth in digital radio shipments.” says Stephanie Ethier, In-Stat analyst. “The reality of the math is that even modest adoption in heavily populous countries such as China and India drives a large impact in global shipments.”
In some recent studies done by In-Stat, they found that:
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Worldwide, the market for both satellite and terrestrial digital radio, combined, will grow to over 55 million unit shipments in 2012.
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Key suppliers of semiconductor digital radio integrated circuits (ICs) for this market include Frontier Silicon, NXP, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments.
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A variety of digital radio broadcast standards are being deployed, largely on a geographic basis. Among these include iBiquity’s IBOC technology, Eureka 147 (also referred to as digital audio broadcasting (DAB)), terrestrial integrated services digital broadcasting (ISDB-T), Satellite digital audio radio services (S-DARS), and Digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB).
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A large factor of digital radio growth is the increase in the HD radio market.
If you would like to read more, or purchase In-Stat’s study on Digital Radio Growth you can visit http://www.in-stat.com/ to purchase their most recent publications.
