The agricultural and livestock sector is consolidating its position as a leader in the deployment of the Internet of Things in Spain, bringing together close to 45% of connected devices. This is the main takeaway from the fifth edition of the IoT Map in Spain: a study that analyzes IoT’s weight in the digital transformation of Spain’s regions and sectors, based on 5,446,308 devices connected to the UnaBiz network, deployed across 80% of the Spanish territory.
Agriculture and livestock leading the IoT application
In this fifth edition, the application sectors and the main use cases have been analyzed to provide a comprehensive view of IoT’s presence in Spain. Agriculture and livestock lead the sectoral split by a wide margin, accounting for 44.80% of devices. They are followed by energy efficiency (17.11%), environmental hygiene (16.05%), security (8.58%), and logistics (8.30%).
The weight of the primary sector challenges the traditional perception that farming is slow to modernize: quite the opposite, the agricultural sector is actively adopting innovative technologies to improve its efficiency, productivity, and sustainability.
By project type, the most widespread use case is cattle monitoring, representing 34.42% of devices. Next comes air quality control (18.67%), monitoring water consumption (11.72%), monitoring of older adults (7.22%), and crop monitoring (7.14%). In this regard, the growth of IoT applications in environmental health and people’s well-being is notable.
A landscape that is increasingly balanced regionally
The results paint a dynamic and evolving picture, in which more and more territories are closing the gap with the leading regions. The most significant change in this edition is the leadership shift: Catalonia becomes the region with the greatest number of connected devices, with 16.57% of the total, and overtakes the Community of Madrid, which accounts for 15.55%. The distance between the two is minimal, compared with the previous edition’s comfortable primacy, when the Madrid region hovered around 37% of the total.
Andalusia consolidates once again the third place with 13.10% and these three regions together account for 45.2% of devices. Behind the podium lies a competitive middle block: Castile and León (7.92%) and Basque Country (7.84%) are virtually tied around 8%, followed by Valencian Community (5.93%) and Balearic Islands (5.85%).
These data reveal significant growth for Castile and León, which accounted for 3.39% of devices in the previous edition, and for the Basque Country, which stood at 5.32%. Consequently, the territorial gap between the most advanced regions narrows.
“It is revealing to see how IoT deployment spreads and tends to equalize across regions, reflecting the maturity this technology is reaching in our country,” says Manuel Álvarez, Managing Director of UnaBiz Spain. “Moreover, its application in areas such as cattle monitoring or air quality control is crucial to spur innovation in strategic sectors and to improve efficiency, sustainability, and people’s health.”
