Wireless Charging Receiver Market Not Growing as Fast as IHS Forecast, Its Analyst Says

Thursday. But numbers will be better than IHS anticipated midyear after CES and Mobile World Congress didn’t yield the expected number of new smartphones or tablets with wireless charging capability, Sanderson said. While the industry will “struggle” to reach estimates for this year, IHS expects to still see significant growth for the wireless charging market over 2013, he said. Sanderson expects growth in the wireless charging market to get a boost going forward from the wearables category. The Moto 360 smart watch has Qi inductive wireless charging built in, and Apple CEO Tim Cook referenced wireless charging for the Apple Watch at the wearable's product announcement in September. A caveat to wireless charging for wearables derives from the category name itself, Sanderson said. “It’s called a wearable, so the consumer shouldn’t really have to take it off to charge it.” Technologies today require users to do that, either placing the wearable on a surface or near a transmitter for charging. That will change in the near future with far-field wireless charging over a distance of as much as 30 feet, Sanderson said. Energous, with WattUp technology that won a CES Innovations award for 2015, announced this week it has joined the Power Matters Alliance and completed initial FCC Part 15 certification testing for its WattUp receivers. Energous’ technology delivers “scalable power” using the same radio bands as a Wi-Fi router, according to company literature, and allows “meaningful, useable power” that users can tap into while roaming so the device doesn’t have to be plugged in or positioned on a mat for charging, it said. The wireless charging market began slowly in 2014 but picked up midyear with the introduction of products with embedded Qi receivers, including the LG G3, Google Nexus 6 and, more recently, the Nokia 830, which has a receiver that’s both PMA- and Qi-enabled, Sanderson said. He said he “wouldn’t be surprised” to see more developments in multimode, multidevice wireless charging products. On the likelihood of a unified standard, Sanderson said that without A4WP (Alliance for Wireless Power) charging products in the market, “it’s not a level playing field” for consumers to compare products and decide which technologies they prefer. A4WP had expected to have Rezence products in the market by year-end, but that hasn’t happened. A spokesman for A4WP didn’t comment. Over the next couple of years, Sanderson expects to see much more multimode and multistandard support for the tightly coupled technology -- Qi, PMA and Rezence -- as manufacturers look to safeguard themselves in a multihorse field.