Last month I posted about the importance of defining your individual company SAM (service addressable market), or the particular space in which you compete, in order to understand its opportunities and challenges. I want to pick back up on that theme with another SAM you can find within the larger scope of the IOTA, Traditional AV Manufacturers. 

As the name implies, we define this segment as global vendors of the core AV products -- speakers, displays, microphones, control systems, etc. -- primarily for use in collaboration, control, and learning solutions. We leave out entertainment, events, and signage for this exercise as these aren't necessarily central to many of the traditional AV provider business, at least not for the purposes of this SAM segment. We also do not include any services, since these are the manufacturers and not the integrator installers. All revenues are without a channel mark-up as well in an effort to represent shipped cost. 

The result here is quite revealing about some of the challenges we heard reported about 2023, as a year of more difficult growth for many companies. While the Traditional AV Manufacturer segment represents approximately $48B in global revenues in 2024, growth is lower than the overall industry wide averages reported by IOTA. In 2023, this segment grew at a much more anemic 1.6%, against a top-line growth of 6.9%. 2024 is similar, with growth for the segment predicted to be 3.2% vs. 6.1% overall. Lastly, the 5-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is 3.1% vs. 5.4% for the pro AV industry as a whole. In summary, the traditional AV manufacturer segment is not growing as much as other areas of the market are. 

So what's going on? From a straight definitions and framing perspective the above purposefully leaves out the parts of the industry that are growing at faster rates. That comes down to anything associated with events and entertainment, cloud and managed services, and IT infrastructures. Whether any or all of these should be included in your own companies SAM analysis will depend on your product mix, use cases, and customer base. But if they aren't, you may want to ask yourself -- should they be? This is the point of a data set like the IOTA. It will both show you how your current business segment is performing and highlight the opportunity that might come from a shifted focus. Take a look for yourself!  Check out AVIXA's IOTA.