Mobile industry organisation GSMA predicts that 5G will power 25% of global connections by 2025, up from 8% in 2021.2 This zone of expanding opportunity for international companies will benefit global trade as a whole, but some sectors will be able to leverage 5G to their advantage better than others.
Financial services, for instance, may use 5G in conjunction with artificial intelligence and the cloud to overcome intractable trade issues like information friction and poor data quality. The latter in particular has been found to be responsible for an average of US$12.9 million per year in losses per company, to say nothing of the poor decision making resulting from bad data.3
The high bandwidth and low latency enabled by 5G, coupled with its support of distributed compute architectures, empowers financial services to translate their Big Data into real-time insights and actionable intelligence. This is crucial to making decisions with billions of dollars at stake, particularly with volatile factors like commodity prices and exchange rates at play.
Trade finance can use a combination of blockchain-based smart contracts and 5G-powered Internet of Things (IoT) devices to drastically reduce the paperwork involved in verifying the delivery of goods.
The smart contract can respond to real-time events in the logistical process, for instance, if a container ship reaches a port or if a shipment changes hands from distributor to manufacturer. Trade finance products that depend on this information—letters of credit, purchase order financing, and the like—can leverage this real-time 5G-powered information to speed up transactions and remove costly intermediaries.
M-commerce (mobile commerce) has been on a steady rise in the wake of COVID-induced digitalisation—63% of APAC respondents most commonly shop within a mobile app, with 35% typically paying with their digital wallets.4
5G is already transforming the m-commerce experience as we speak. By enabling much faster transfers of data between mobile devices, 5G can unlock the benefits of virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) for retail experiences. In the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) alone, VR/AR spending is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 47.7% to reach US$28.8 billion in value by 2024—an expansion facilitated by the increased availability of 5G in the region.5
5G will underpin other technologies converging in the commerce space. The Metaverse, for example, depends on 5G as a critical enabler for its device and application developer ecosystem. Wider 5G adoption will lead to the mainstreaming of virtual, Metaverse-based showrooms that enable more engaging and immersive shopping experiences. 48% of APAC industry professionals are already expecting AR/VR showrooms to make an impact by 2023.6
Supply chain efficiencies will also be vastly improved with the application of 5G-based services. At Singapore’s Pasir Panjang Terminal, for instance, the PSA Corporation is working with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and Singtel, among other partners, to trial 5G’s use on its automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and rubber tyred gantry cranes.
5G’s high bandwidth and high connection density can potentially operate about 2,000 AGVs in Tuas Megaport simultaneously, compared to 4G’s 400-unit maximum. 5G’s lower latency also means near-real-time response by the AGVs to issued commands.7
For the larger logistics picture, 5G and edge computing applications can power Supply Chain 4.0: a state-of-the-art logistics infrastructure that leverages big data and intelligence to enable more granular, accurate, and efficient delivery, from first to last mile.8
It’s larger than the sum of its technological parts: Supply Chain 4.0 transforms the supply chain management model “from a linear model in which instructions flow from supplier to producer to distributor to consumer, and back, to a more integrated model in which information flows in an omnidirectional manner to the supply chain.”9
Manufacturing sector businesses were early adopters of 5G, with various use cases already well-established in present-day “smart factories.” 5G overcomes the limitations of current connectivity options like WiFi and 4G—providing high bandwidth and low latency for production-line processes without the interference or lag that bedevils its predecessors.
Edge-computing applications allow smart machines on the factory floor to extract insights and formulate actions at near real-time—enabling applications like IoT-based predictive maintenance that minimises component failure; digital twins that simulate production processes in a virtual environment; and robots that can operate more efficiently without human control.
It’s estimated that 5G applications in manufacturing will add US$134 billion to global GDP by 2030—with US$130 billion of this to be generated by the productivity dividend produced by autonomous robots and vehicles in industrial settings.10
