Industrials Industry Overview: Smart Cities

When considering the Industrials sector, it’s usually rare to see widespread revolutionary change in an industry, and it is much rarer to see a new industry develop. Given how capital intensive it is to be an industrials company, competitors are typically limited, so there is less probability for disruptive innovation. Despite this, there is a relatively new industry in the sector that is less capital intensive where we have noticed significant technological innovation: smart cities.

The idea for Smart Cities has come from companies within the energy and water monitoring industry, which receive most of their revenue through city or state governments. In the past, companies created meters to monitor energy or water use that had to either be manually checked by making a physical visit to the meter, or their information was automatically sent to governments or municipalities through automatic meter reading. Today, the energy consumption meters have progressed even further, with the introduction of smart meters. Smart meters not only provide governments with real-time information on the consumption of water or energy, they also provide real-time information concerning the location of outages or leakages and peak usage times during the day. Companies are now creating a smart cities industry by offering governments a packaged deal made up of smart meters for gas, water, and electricity combined with data analytics on the information gathered.