​The Apple (AAPL) world is once again abuzz with rumors that Apple is getting ready to announce a long awaited AR/VR headset device in the near future, with much of the stimulus coming from a report that Apple board members were treated to a preview of the device at a recent board meeting, which was taken to mean that such a device (codename N301[1]) is in an ‘advanced stage’ and that a second AR only device (codename N421) is under development, along with an XR operating system (codename rOS[2]) under which the platforms will run.  Some have liken the potential release of an Apple AR/VR product to the announcement and release of the Apple Watch back in September 2014 and released in April 2015, the last new product category released by the company, but we have a great deal of trouble equating a digital watch, a form of device that has been around for more than 150 years, and a device that has been around commercially since 2013 and is still under considerable development. 
The rumor mill has been churning out ‘details’ about Apple’s AR/VR development project team (codename TDG for ‘Technology Design Group’), which has been said to consist of up to 2,000 Apple employees operating out of one of Apple’s Sunnyvale R&D centers since 2015, especially after Apple stepped up bonuses for key employees at the end of last year to stem Facebook’s (FB) talent poaching to broaden Meta’s own XR project (codename ‘Project Cambria’).  However there have been many false starts concerning Apple's AR/V’ development, with a number of loose timelines for an announcement and release passing by years ago (First was 2019?), so leaked progress reports, renderings, a component ‘details’ continue as the project winds on.  Excitement usually builds as we approach the Apple Developers Conference which starts on June 6, during which bits of code that might reference such an operating system or application for AR/VR are revealed during sessions or leak out ‘accidentally’, and this year is no different given the ~92% expansion in AR/VR units seen in last year, but also putting that in perspective, it equates to ~11m units, while smartwatch shipments reached over 127m units last year of which Apple has a roughly 50% share. 
While we can cite all sorts of potential features and component specs that have been speculated on in reference to a potential Apple XR headset, we expect Apple to push both design and performance specifications when it finally makes such a device available, but even the mighty marketing machine at Apple likely recognizes that aside from a ‘cool/hip’ design, any commercial XR product needs a very compelling application to make it a ubiquitous product, and asking customers to fork over somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000 for a headset that tells them how much further they have to run before they meet their daily goal or how much that handbag in the window costs on Amazon (AMZN) might be a hard sell.  The Metaverse is an attractive incentive for hardware manufacturers but the Metaverse is still a conceptual idea rather than a practical one and has little intrinsic value other than as a publicity tool. 
We do note that Google (GOOG) does seem to understand that in the real world applications sell hardware (see or note 5/12/22), especially for relatively new product categories, and while we expect Apple to capture significant market share in the XR space when it finally enters and will add considerable legitimacy to the space leading to market expansion, there still needs to be a reason for consumers to want to wear even a sleek and hip looking headset for an extended period of time.  VR’s entertainment value is obvious, although far from mainstream and so we look toward AR as a more realistic approach to the extended reality space, but again passing curiosity does not sell millions of units but practical applications do.  Did you buy your first smartphone so you could watch chimpanzees in Uganda from a secret encampment or did you buy it so you could speak to colleagues, friends and family whenever you were away from a ‘landline[3]’?


[1] You know its real if it has a codename, right? 

[2] The ‘r’ in ‘rOS’ stands for ‘reality’, another codename adding additional ‘code name cred’ to the story…

[3] For the younger generation, a ‘landline’ is a telephone that is connected to a carrier through a wire and is traditionally mounted permanently in a home or office and cannot be carried with the user.

​In April and earlier this month (05/09/22) we noted some of the issues that were causing Chinese flexible OLED panel producer Royole (pvt) to fight to stay in business, despite being the first company to produce a foldable OLED display, beating OLED leaders Samsung Display and LG Display.  We noted that a possible scenario would be for the Chinese government to bail out the company, particularly the $1.64b flexible OLED fab project started in late 2016 that was only partially completed.  It seems that things have gone from bad to worse for the company as Royole served notice of termination to a large number of employees earlier this week, giving them three options that must be chosen by today.

• Receive a basic salary (40% or normal rate) times the number of years of employment paid out within 6 months
• Receive the same basic salary as above but paid out at the end of this month at a 50% discount
• May stay as an employee but at a salary of $352.

Notifications have been given to marketing, sales, product development and the smartphone divisions, excluding only some employees that have been with the company for at least 4 years, with some departments seeing >50% termination rates.  That said, the company is increasing the salary of those in the “Advanced Technology R&R & Production Platform” division, essentially the area where the displays are produced in order to retain those employees as the company tries to transition away from producing and selling commercial products (smartphones, tablets, etc) and focus on supplying flexible OLED displays to customers.
In mid-2021 Royole has ~1,800 employees but now has <500 and has closed all but one office as available cash declined to $14.9m in April, and the company had previously offered options to employees to raise capital and provide an additional incentive to stay with the company but with the current large layoffs, most will not be participating in the program.  Hopefully a recently announced potential display order will help to keep the company afloat, however based on past financials between 2018 and mid-2020, the company had produced only 18,000 display units so a massive ramp for such an order would be called for, and the utilization rates for those periods never reached above 32%.  Its going to take a very big Band-Aid to fix this wound…

Smartphone shipments in China increased by 44.4% m/m in March but declined 40.6% y/y.  At 21.46m units, shipments were 4.5m units (-10.6%) below our estimate.  We note that on a seasonal basis the 5 year average m/m gain for shipments in China in March has been 102.1%, after the Chinese New Year holiday which usually falls in February, so the gain in March, while it seems impressive, is the lowest gain in that month since 2017.  1Q shipments totaled 69.35m units, down 32.2% q/q and down 29.2% y/y which precludes any prediction of a near-term recovery in the Chinese smartphone market.  April is typically up (5 yr. avg.) 21.8% m/m, although last year it was down 23.8% and 2Q overall is typically up 39.9% q/q (5 yr. avg.) although it was also down 22.3% last year.  While our 381.24m (up 8.7% y/y) unit estimate for the full 2022 year is already under pressure, we believe it is a bit too early to make adjustments.
5G smartphone shipments in April in China were 16.19m units, up 42.3% m/m but down 41.1% y/y against a very strong March in 2021 (+82.5% m/m & +342.5% y/y) after the 2021 New Year holiday, so we get little from the single month 5G shipment data in March, although 5G share of total unit shipped remained over 75% in March and through 1Q and seems to have leveled off in a range between 70% and 80% for the last year.  62.8% of new smartphone models were equipped with 5G capabilities in March, the highest percentage since January 2021, which would indicate that the trend to bring 5G capabilities to mid and lower tier smartphones is continuing.  Data from the three major network carriers in China suggests a total of 848.1m 5G subscribers at the end of March, which is more than twice the entire population of the US, but still represents a penetration rate of ~60%, with 1.6m 5G base stations (most recent update from the Chinese government) in operation.
While the scale of China’s 5G development is massive, the restrictions the US government has placed on Huawei (pvt) and ZTE (000063.CH) have given rise to the criticism that the country is more focused on expanding 5G across the broader population than providing high speed 5G, and hints  from China about their plans for C-band bandwidth allocations (higher speed spectrum) have indicated that those plans have been put on hold to focus more on lower speed spectrum that can travel further than C-band.  The trade limitations have also made it more difficult for carriers and smartphone brands to get the more advanced silicon needed for higher speed transport, so we expect the criticism has some truth, but also begs the question as to which path would be more valuable to the country as a whole. A densely populated city like Shanghai already boasts the fastest 5G speeds globally, with China Mobile (941.HK) having a 5G base station for every 1,056 residents in the city of 28.5m, so as 5G is pushed further into smaller cities and rural areas where signal distances are considerably wider between base stations, lower speed spectrum that travels further is the logical solution for a country that is just slightly smaller than Canada, but with almost 38x the population.

You bought a new phone a few months ago as part of a special offer from your carrier that seemed to give you a huge discount on the phone itself and a less expensive plan than you had been using before the offer, but now new and less expensive plans have been popping up as carrier competition increases.  You don’t have a contract and other plans are willing to pay out what you still owe on your new phone, but shifting carriers means you have to change your Sim card which means you have to save Gigs of phone information to the cloud and then hope it can be brought back without any errors, or those Halloween pictures you took of the kids when they were babies will be lost forever.  Is it worth it just to save a few bucks?
With new standards for eSIMs just released by the GSMA, large mobile industry support organization, it will become easier to provision smartphones or other mobile devices without any physical hardware changes, which will allow the eventual elimination of the SIM card, which has been around in some form since 1991.  SIM cards store authentication information needed by networks to identify those devices that are subscribed to that specific network, along with emergency numbers, service numbers and storage for user data, and while the size of physical SIM cards has continued to decline from the original 3.57” x 2.13” card to today’s nano-SIMs (0.48” x 0.315”), they are still a thorn in the side of both mobile operators and their customers.
We note that SIM cards are not only used in smartphones, but the many security systems that use cellular service to communicate with central stations or emergency services must follow the same authentication and identification procedures that are part of smartphones.  Many of those devices were built to use 2G networks, communicating via SMS messages, which forces carriers to continue to maintain 2G networks to allow those devices to function.  Where things get complicated is with IoT, where eventually billions of devices will need to be connected to a network, and those devices will need the same connectivity identification as mobile users, which is why the eSIM was invented.  As an embedded device, the eSIM is part of each smartphone or IoT device and is not removable.  This serves two functions, the first, saving considerable space inside any mobile device, allowing for a smaller size of larger battery or other components to increase functionality.  Second, the eSIm can be programmed over the air, meaning carrier changes can be made easily, without any physical intervention.
We have noted previously that carriers were very wary of the eSIM idea, fearing that mobile users would flip from one carrier to another every time a new discount program was offered, especially heavily discounted programs, but that fear had to be weighed against the opportunities presented by IoT, with its potential for rapid device count expansion, and the cost savings of not having to force the user to go to an expensively staffed physical location.  While we expect that most normal mobile users are unaware of the potential for shifting carriers via eSIM and would still resist the procedure unless it was quite advantageous financially, we do believe that over time younger users will begin to realize that they can switch carriers as often as they would like, especially if they can find a bill aggregator that will allow them to pay whatever carrier they happen to be using during a given month automatically, but that is more of a generational change that will take time, giving carriers the runway to find ways to hold onto e-SIM customers more tightly.
We did a fast check of smartphones that include e-SIM cards, either exclusively or in combination with a physical SIM.  Last year there were 36 phone models that were e-SIM only and 18 that were either dual or triple SIM models.  So far this year there have been 9 e-SIM only models and 16 models that include an e-SIM and at least one physical SIM card, which would indicate that while phone brands are happy to provide e-SIMs, we expect they will be more likely to provide both capabilities until the user base and carriers become more open to using the e-SIM only.  That said, smartphone brands also gain another advantage by using e-SIMs, and that is having to produce less variations of each model, especially variants that are carrier specific, as the e-SIM allows any carrier network to be used with any phone.
All in progress on e-SIM specifications that make it easier for both phone brands and carriers to adopt the technology are good for the consumer and advantageous for the brands themselves.  There are things that continue to slow adoption, primarily the requirement for carriers and service providers to have certified security facilities to manage the encryption keys imbedded in e-SIMs, particularly MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators – aka service providers that do not own their own network), who are big physical SIM supporters as they fear the ‘churn’ mentioned above.  That said however, we do expect real e-SIM push will come from smartphone brands who are always looking for internal smartphone real estate and a chance to reduce power requirements that the e-SIM would allow.

China’s TCL (000100.CH) was the first major TV set brand to release a mini-LED based TV and is now on its 4th generation of such devices, while major competitor Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) has recently released it 2nd generation Mini-LED TV lineup.   TCL has approached the Mini-LED/QD TV market differently than its competitors, pricing its sets considerably below major brands to generate high unit volumes and the most recent additions are more of the same.  While we don’t yet have full specifications to compare against for the TCL line, we can give some approximation as to the comparable sets in the Samsung line, which points out that price difference.  Again, the TCL and Samsung sets do not have the same feature sets so a point-by-point comparison is not being made here, just a rough idea as to the price points and the TVs have yet 

China is the largest market for TV sets so growth and prospects for the country’s TV set business is a significant data point toward understanding the global TV market, a cornerstone of the CE space.  2020 was a good year for TV set sales overall as COVID-19 kept viewers indoors and more deeply interested in watching TV.  China saw TV set shipments of 44.5m units that year, generating TV set sales just under $17.95B us, however last year the price of LCD TV panels continued to climb and took a toll on China’s TV set unit volume, which declined by 13.8%.  While this was bad news for China’s TV set brands, the value of those TV set sales increased by 6.6% last year as panel prices increased in 1H ’21 along with average TV set prices.  That said, as TV panel prices declined in 2H ’21, TV set prices remained relatively high, with Chinese TV brands trying to gain margin in what is a low margin business. 
But it seems that the relatively high TV set prices and a less onerous COVID infection rate have begun to take a further toll on TV set shipments in China, with 1Q ’22 TV set unit volume down 10.8% y/y and sales down 11.0% y/y.  Given the strong 1Q seen last year weaker results in 1Q this year should not be a big surprise, but more telling will be 2Q results in China that would be more indicative of a trend, but while TV panel prices are still declining, component shortages and price increases will likely push unit volumes lower.  The good news for TV set brands in China however is that unit volume comparisons will become easier in 2H while sales comparisons should be a bit more difficult. 
Chinese TV set brands are a bit slower to reduce the aggressive unit volume targets that they set toward the end of the previous year and sometimes do not publicly make those changes known, although leaks from suppliers now tend to eventually reveal same, but Chinese TV set brands are facing a difficult problem in that set prices are still relatively high giving little incentive for Chinese consumers to upgrade.  Some of the higher price points are due to component and transportation costs, but the Chinese set market is proving to be a bit less elastic that brands might have assumed, with the average price of a TV set in China falling by 7.5% q/q in 1Q this year while both unit volume and sales dollars both declined. 
The problem seems to be that from a consumer’s standpoint, the average price of a TV set in China is basically flat y/y, after peaking in 2Q last year, so there seems to be little incentive to trade up currently.  If Chinese brands are willing or able to bring TV set prices down further, there is some chance that Chinese consumers could see value later this year against last year’s higher ASP’s, which is what both Chinese TV set brands and panel producers are counting on, and likely the reason volume targets have not changed in light of the 1Q weakness.  The May 1st 5 day Labor Day holiday in China is expected to show weaker sales than last year despite aggressive promotions but many expect it to be the turning point for the CE space in China, with 2H pulling Chinese CE brands back into a more positive zone.  Seasonally that would be the obvious bet but much will depend on how stringent the Chinese government is concerning further COVID lockdowns and how flexible CE brands will be toward lowering prices if raw material and component prices begin to ease, and those are much less tangible situations.

​There are two basic types of OLED displays.  RGB (red, green, blue) displays that are made up of pixels that contain red, green, and blue sub-pixels, and WOLED displays, which consist of blue and yellow/green layers that combine to form white light, which is then converted into reed, green, and blue sub-pixels through a color filter.  As we have noted previously, Samsung Display (pvt) has developed another type of OLED display that is based on a blue and green OLED layer that is converted into more precise red, green, and blue sub-pixels using quantum dots.  While this is a highly simplified picture of these OLED structures, there is a nuance that is quite important and that is the actual OLED materials used to create these displays.
There are two general types of OLED emitting materials, fluorescent and phosphorescent, and while those terms both encompass light-emitting materials, they are quite different.  While both materials generate light when electrically stimulated fluorescent materials generate light in a ‘singlet state’ while phosphorescent OLED materials generate light in a ‘triplet state’, and before you fall back into the glaze of Chemistry 101, the simplified explanation of what that means is phosphorescent OLED materials can emit close to 100% of the light generated, while fluorescent OLED materials can emit ~25%.  Given that the objective of all displays is to generate the most amount of light with the least amount of power, phosphorescent OLED materials are preferred, however there is a catch.
Red and green phosphorescent OLED materials are commonly used in RGB displays, however blue phosphorescent OLED materials tend to be unstable and have lifetimes that are shorter than necessary for most displays, so OLED display producers have been forced to use blue fluorescent OLED materials to fill the gap in RGB displays.  This means that the blue layer would be producing les light than its red and green phosphorescent counterparts, so OLED display designers double or triple the blue layer to balance the system.  While that works from a visual point-of-view, it requires considerably more power and is therefore an inefficient device, and many companies are working toward finding a stable phosphorescent blue OLED material to eliminate that inefficiency.
While we have read through literally hundreds of papers and IP filings that are looking for solutions to the phosphorescent blue issue, no commercial blue phosphorescent OLED emitter material has appeared in the market.  Universal Display (OLED), the holder of the IP for heavy metal red and green phosphorescent OLED emitter material, which it exclusively supplies to all OLED display manufacturers, has one of the largest blue phosphorescent material R&D programs and has stated that they expect to have a commercial blue phosphorescent OLED emitter available in 2024 while others have stated earlier goals, many of which have passed without success.  A recent article in the South Korean press indicated that Samsung Display itself was doing research toward the development of a blue phosphorescent OLED emitter which would allow the company to replace the three layers of blue fluorescent emitter material in its QD/OLED stack with one blue phosphorescent blue layer, reducing power requirements and simplifying the deposition process, but thus far we do not believe that has occurred. 
More likely would be a collaborative effort between Samsung Display and UDC toward such a product, with SDC sharing the material science behind their blue material, which is based on a platinum/carbene combination, and UDC extending the characteristics of the material to reach commercial specifications.  The SDC material has a LT70 lifetime[1] of 1,113 hours at 1,000 nits, which would be about the peak brightness of an iPhone 13 Pro Max, and the LT70 degradation would occur in roughly a year, but the press note suggests that SDC’s research has progressed considerably since the paper was written, with ‘visible results’ expected by SDC within a year from the original writing (~15 months ago).
Much of the article was speculation concerning SDC’s internal development efforts toward developing a blue phosphorescent emitter but the paper on which that speculation is based noted that the materials being developed were reactive to host materials commonly used and further development of those host materials would be necessary to take advantage of the newly developed blue phosphorescent emitter materials. This leads us to believe that a commercial blue phosphorescent emitter system is still a further away than the press article might suggest.  All in, we expect all major OLED display producers are doing at least some research toward the development of a stable blue phosphorescent OLED emitter, likely in conjunction with UDC or other OLED materials suppliers.  While progress is certainly being made in the development of such a material, the fact that new research has been published could move development forward but is only a gateway to the commercial development and production of a new material.  We keep our expectations low as many promises have been made in the past and the development of blue LEDs was far more challenging and time-consuming than its red and green cousins, so we know it will eventually be done but take all timeline assumptions with a grain of salt..


[1] LT70 means the length of time it takes for the material to lose 30% of its light output.

Not surprisingly 5G vendor growth remained relatively flat during what would be considered a difficult period for the CE space, although overall 5G device count was up 2.9% in April and 5G phone offerings grew 5.6% m/m, albeit the slowest growth for 5G phones in April since we began tracking the data.  April tends to be the strongest month in 2Q for 5G phone offerings so we would expect to see relatively little 5G phone offering growth in May.  Most other 5G device metrics remained flat in April with lockdowns in China, the war in Ukraine and inflation all contributing to a general lack of growth in the CE space and some hesitancy about the timing of product releases. 
China’s original goal for 2022 was to install an additional 600,000 5G base stations, a 42% increase in the total base station count over last year and while China’s carriers saw strong 5G subscriber growth early this year, we expect COVID lockdowns have slowed both base station installs and potential subscriber growth since then.  This might slow China’s longer-term plan to have 3.64m base stations active by the end of 2025, or 26 for every 10,000 Chinese citizens, up from 5/person in 2020.  We do note that while lockdowns have slowed 5G base station installation growth in the past, the fact that the government has set these goals for the country and that the carriers must comply, we have seen a rapid return to installations as soon as restrictions are lifted, so we see the possibility that China will still meet its short-term and long-term 5G base station goals, despite the lockdowns.

While inflation is a given for anyone who drives a car or buys groceries, the effect of rising costs on CE businesses can be enormous, particularly for those that sell hardware.   A quick look at Samsung Electronics (005630.KS), the 2nd largest CE company by sales, and LG Electronics (066570.KS), the 6th largest, shows how much costs have risen over the last two years, particularly last year.  Transportation costs in 1Q 2022 are up 40.9% y/y for Samsung and up 47.9% for LG and that increases to 102.3% for Samsung and 139.7% for LG when comparing 1Q this year against 1Q 2020.  For the full year Samsung saw its 2021 spend on logistics increase by 25.8% y/y while LG saw its full year 2021 logistics expenses rise by 62.2%
In past years, transportation costs for CE products were usually a function of demand, with higher cost air freight being used when demand was high and container shipping when delivery time was less critical.  While those factors still exist to a degree, Figure 2 shows the China/Shanghai Container Freight Index, which hit an all-time high early this year, and that has caused both companies to have already spent  about 1/3 of what they spent for the entire last year just in 1Q of this year on transportation & logistics.

​Raw materials have also been a major burden on CE companies, with Samsung seeing an increase of 24.3% y/y in 1Q of this year, and LG seeing an increase of 15.4% in the same period and this includes a 42% decline in LCD panel prices y/y.  But other components, such as application processors (up 41%), flexible PCBs (up 19%) and camera modules (up 8%) and more basic materials such as copper (up 36.4%), steel (20.4%) and silicon wafers (up 4%) all added to the sharp increase in material costs and reduced profitability.  We have seen some component prices begin to level off but it is hard to predict whether these are changes that indicate a more normalized CE demand environment, seasonality, or the result of a year of pull-ins from CE brands.  China is still pursuing its stringent COVID policies and the war in Ukraine is pressuring global energy and commodity markets, so there is certainly no clear picture as to where CE costs and profitability will wind up for the year.  That said, as we have previously noted, we expect 3Q to be better than 2Q as inventories are built for the holidays, but expect 2H to be only marginally better than 1H.  All in, it is going to be a tough year for most CE companies, especially on a y/y basis so we pay special, attention to costs this year.

Digital twins, no not Mario & Luigi or the Property Brothers, although both could be considered digital twins if they are viewed on any digital media, but ‘real’ digital twins, meaning digital constructs that are used in analytics and predictive analysis.  Since 2002, when Michael Grieves introduced the concept[1] at an engineering conference.  NASA began using the idea in 2010 when it created simulations of space capsules and vehicles for testing, and has since been cited as one of the top 10 technology trends of the last few years. 
So what is a digital twin?  Simply a digital twin is a mathematical model of an object.  Static mathematical models (aka Monte Carlo simulation) represent an object at a given point in time and have been around for centuries, but dynamic mathematical models are time dependent and therefore change as parameters change over time, and while external observational changes could be made to dynamic models, only recently has technology been available to make those changes without human intervention.  The data for such models can be as simple as the mathematical description of the physical characteristics of a golf ball or as complex as the entire workings of a manufacturing plant, but the most important characteristic of a digital twin is that it is dynamic and can be used to simulate or mimic the actual object or objects on which it is based, without affecting the object itself.
Digital twins have innumerable uses in a wide variety of applications, ranging from stress testing to workflow, and can be used both before a product is developed, during that development for product scenario simulation, and after a product is developed for testing and modifications to extend the product’s abilities, with data from sensors that monitor the product in actual use feeding back information to the twin.  This also includes real-world historical data that can be added to the twin, all of which can be used to predict how the product will work and in what ways it can be improved, without the myriad prototypes and static models that are usually needed during product development and improvement.
There are many technologies on which the digital twin concept relies.  AI, analytics, and machine learning, and advances in these areas can certainly go toward increasing the value of digital twins across a broad number of applications and industries, but while IoT and sensor technology is usually given short shrift relative to flashier technology, the ability to feed real-time information from working products to digital twins is a major step forward that will add considerably to their value, and that data will allow faster product development and more responsive products as the digital twins gather more information. 
Of course, we can’t have wires running from sensors on equipment running across the country to product development or testing labs, so how will all of that real-time information get to digital twins? 5G would be the ideal mechanism for moving the data as close to real-time as possible and the highest transport speeds in 5G are those using mmWave spectrum.  While the necessity for mmWave speed and low latency are less for the typical mobile user, the bandwidth of mmWave does allow for lots of data to be sent without congestion or bottlenecks, which bolsters the case for mmWave private networks in industrial or business settings, particularly where digital twin applications are more commonplace. 
By mimicking physical assets, process operations, and frameworks, digital twins paired with 5G IoT transport can allow employees to view equipment in remote locations in real-time to solve production or maintenance issues without travel, such as in oil refineries, and can help to improve automotive design for vehicles from trucks to Formula racecars, and can solve some of the more recent global supply chain issues by creating and defining more efficient logistic networks.  Building maintenance and space optimization can be simplified using a digital twin and in retail, sensor information can be fed to a digital twin to predict customer behavior and the financial impact of a wide variety of scenarios, so while technologies like AR/VR get much of the headlines, digital twin software is the more practical side of the digital world and with growth estimates between 25% and 35% over the next few years, the opportunities for the expanding use of digital twins seems obvious, especially as IoT sensor and data transport technologies improve.


[1] The actual digital twin concept came from “Mirror Worlds” by David Gelerner in 1991.