Imperial Capital: Growth in smart home market will benefit large security companies, but not smaller ones

I recently wrote about a new ABI Research report that predicts professional security companies' share of the smart home market will be cut in half by 2019 as telecom and cableco competitors leverage their own strengths in the space.

However, not all security companies will fare the same, according to a new report from Imperial Capital, a New York City full-service investment bank. Imperial Capital says that large security companies will do much better than smaller ones as the smart home market grows.

Imperial Capital's latest prediction on the market for the next six to seven years was released today. It differs from the ABI report in that it drills down more on how size matters.

Simply put, what Imperial Capital predicts is that the top 30 residential security companies will do well over that time period, whereas “the bottom 80 percent of security providers” will see negative growth.

The report, authored by Jeff Kessler, Imperial Capital's managing director of institutional research, says that Imperial Capital's and ABI's views on the market are “generally consistent.” However, Kessler writes, “our biggest difference with the ABI report may be that it does not separate out the top 30 security companies from the rest of the industry, which may very well have customer generation problems.”

Those big companies will do well, Imperial Capital says in its report.

“Our estimates are that the market for home services will grow about 10 percent annually over the next seven years to over 50 million homes, driven by new applications form the security industry, new home services offerings, and marketing from cable and telcos,” the report says. “We estimate the top 30 residential security companies will grow subscribers at about 5 percent annually, from about 11 million current users to about 16-17 million users, driven mainly by life-safety focused subscribers to whom professional response and service and the certainty of police, fire, and personal emergency response is more important than price and bundling convenience.”

However, the report says, “this is offset in our analysis by all other smaller security companies falling from 12 million to 5 or 6 million by 2020.”

When you add those companies—which Imperial Capital says comprise 80 percent of security providers—to the top providers, “we see the security industry as flat to down in this period. In fact, because of this estimated decline in the revenues of small companies, our aggregate estimate of market share is actually more conservative [in] stance than the ABI Study.”

Imperial Capital also believes the smart home market will grow even more than ABI predicts.

“Where we also diverge with the ABI report is in the size of the market six to seven years from now,” the Imperial Capital report says. “ABI estimates a market in six years that is 37 percent larger, and Imperial Capital estimates that it will almost double in six years. The difference, we contend, is new services and technologies from the likes of Alarm.com, Vivint, and iControl … [and also more] “PERS” (personal emergency response systems) home health care and emergency response users. These advanced PERS applications are also being developed.”