japan

The Japanese smart home market is likely to almost fivefold by the year 2024 from its current level. According to a new report The Japanese smart home market is expected to be US$ 5 Billion by 2024.  There is a growing demand in the Japanese market for safe and secure living environment, especially concerning safety functionalities and discrete monitoring for elderly people; also, since the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Japan has been focused on building energy efficient smart homes and supportive devices.

About 50km west of Tokyo on an old Panasonic factory site PanaHome the housing division of Panasonic Group is building its vision of a smart and sustainable town.  The 600 homes and 400 apartments have all the latest appliances and services of a smart home. All the homes are fitted with solar panels for feeding surplus energy into the smart gird, and the world’s first domestic ENE-FARM household fuel-cell generator.

With a market value over US$9 billion, the Asia Pacific (APAC) region is ripe for smart home solutions and services.   This is according to a new study by MarketsandMarkets; which estimated the region’s smart home market to grow at a Compund Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.73 per cent over the next seven years.  The global market is estimated worth over US$51 billion and a CAGR of 17.74 per cent.

The Asian smart grid market of China, Japan and South Korea together are set to more than double to US$19 billion by 2016, according to a research report by GTM Research.  The report Titled “The Smart Grid in Asia, 2012-2016: Markets, Technologies and Strategies”, looks at the cumulative smart gird market of all three countries and provide a five year forecast.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (tokyo:6503) announced today that it has begun full-scale tests of smart grid and related smart-community technologies at the company's production sites in Japan. The aim of the project is to develop and test products including commercial systems, equipment and solutions for annual sales worth 1.3 trillion yen (about 17 billion USD) by March 2016.