Eoin Treacy's view

Here is a link to the full report and here is a section from it: 

2. Autonomous & Connected Vehicles (Jeffrey Osborne): Edge computing already plays a critical role in connected vehicles and autonomous driving applications, and is a key enabler of these technologies that Aptiv sees scaling from a ~$2bn addressable market in 2018 to ~$30bn by 2025. Within our coverage, APTV, LEA, and TSLA are the most exposed to utilizing edge computing for connected cars, and both APTV and TSLA are most exposed for autonomous driving. In the report, we discuss some of the fundamental problems being solved within the vehicle architecture and for domain controllers by Aptiv to enable connected and autonomous vehicles, the Xevo (acquired by Lear) and Otonomo (investment by Aptiv) as a connected car platforms, and Tesla’s early use of OTAs and strategy to build autonomous vehicles via a neural network of connected vehicles.

3. Smart Cities (Jeffrey Osborne): Cities consume ~67% of all energy generated and produce around ¾ of all carbon dioxide emission, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Governments, municipalities, and utilities are increasingly looking at smart infrastructure to address the challenges of rising pollution, overcrowding, and dwindling resources. These smart city deployments look to better utilize existing assets, improve energy efficiency, decrease emissions, reduce unplanned maintenance cost, strengthening grid resiliency, and provide new insights into city planning. Smart city providers and their customers are beginning to leverage higher degrees of edge computing in order to better digest and analyze the massive influx of data generated by these smart IoT installations as well as take action based on the analysis. This should help to create more robust full featured solutions at the cost of low bandwidth and ultimately provide new economic use cases to improve the value of smart city deployments to governments, utilities, and municipalities. Within our coverage we see Itron (ITRI) and Landis+Gyr (LAND.SW) as uniquely positioned to capitalized on this theme over the next decade given their initiatives in the smart meter and smart city markets.

4. Consumer Devices (Krish Sankar): Within the consumer edge device market, we view the rollout of 5G wireless cellular technology and growth in edge computing resources as beneficial to smartphones and the fast-growing smart devices category. We believe the new 5G wireless standard can be a catalyst for smartphone device demand as consumers view it as a material upgrade from existing wireless technology, thus driving a replacement / upgrade cycle over the next 2 to 3 years. Greater access to cloud computing resources and expected growth in AI/ML computing algorithms is expected to complement or underpin the growing utility of smart home devices. On a go-forward basis, the diversity of sensors and the quality of data captured by smart thermostats, security cameras/doorbells, and speakers, etc. is likely to improve the end user experience even more in terms of level of transparency and remote control capabilities of the device.

Each new rollout of mobile technology has led to a new round of innovation in the global economy which has created new investment sectors. The rollout of 4G enabled social media, streaming on phones, a growth opportunity for mobile payments, financial services and online retail.

The rollout of 5G delivers high speed but the biggest innovation is the removal of lag. That is particularly beneficial to the computer game sector which is increasingly taking market share from other forms of entertainment.

It is also particularly beneficial to the remote sensor and automation sectors. Now they have access to cheap web enabled monitoring equipment which can be coupled with real-time lag-less feeds. That is a major step in providing autonomous functionality but is also a step forward in reducing the cost of monitoring all kinds of large pieces of machinery and networks from utilities to data centres.  

As we look at what portion of the technology sector is likely to lead in a recovery the cost savings 5G connectivity potentially represents suggests it will figure highly in the minds of corporate buyers.