Ask four eSIM industry leaders where the market is accelerating, and you’ll get a more nuanced answer than the hype suggests. That’s exactly what happened when we brought together Redtea Mobile, Telenor Linx, Verizon and Saily for the panel session of “The Hidden Challenge of eSIM” webinar with Segron.

Three growth engines stood out — and one stubborn reality.

1. Travel eSIM is the consumer gateway — but onboarding is still broken

The travel segment is where consumers first experience eSIM, and the market is responding: fintech companies and online travel agencies like Klook are now bundling travel eSIMs, and tier-one operators including Deutsche Telekom and Orange have launched their own global travel eSIMs to compete with the specialists.

But the technology’s convenience promise is running ahead of consumer understanding. Saily’s customer research found onboarding was “a problem for everyone” — how to install, how to enable, what settings to toggle. Their fix was almost embarrassingly simple: publish a clear setup guide. Activation times halved. “Even though the technology is for convenience, it’s definitely not yet clear for simple consumers,” said Matas Čenys, Saily’s Head of Product.

Michael Nelson, Head of Roaming Products at Telenor Linx, offered the counterweight: 70–80% of handsets in market may be eSIM-enabled, but 70–80% of those customers are still on plastic SIMs — because for a traditional MNO customer with no reason to switch profiles, there’s no trigger to change. The growth is real, but it’s segment-specific, not universal.

2. China has opened up — and it changes the map

“China just opened up eSIM. It’s not a secret anymore,” said Xiaodong Guo, CMO and VP at Redtea Mobile, pointing to Apple’s eSIM-enabled devices in mainland China and Chinese MNOs opening up new eSIM onboarding use cases. For a market that has historically been more restricted on consumer eSIM, this is a significant shift – for device makers, travel eSIM providers, and anyone testing connectivity in-country. (Segron, notably, announced during the webinar that its first testing device location in China is now live, hosted in Redtea Mobile’s own data centre.)

3. IoT and automotive are the majority wave

“The next majority wave — or the current majority wave — of eSIM growth is on IoT and automotive,” Guo argued. Devices crossing borders, form factors that can’t take a physical SIM slot, and vehicles that need connectivity for 10+ years in-market are driving eSIM adoption faster than consumer handsets.

That wave brings genuinely hard problems. The device spectrum runs from low-cost trackers that barely support HTTP to connected cars more capable than a smartphone. Permanent roaming — once the industry’s bugbear to be contracted away — is now simply a reality to be managed commercially. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get rid of permanent roaming,” admitted Verizon’s Jason Olivieri. The path forward is transparency and commercial terms, not prohibition.

The stubborn reality: plastic isn’t dead

We closed the panel with a quick-fire question: how long will the physical SIM survive? The answers should temper any “SIM is dead” hot takes:

• Michael Nelson (Telenor Linx): two to three years for new subscriptions on new devices — but plastic could linger a decade for legacy devices.
• Xiaodong Guo (Redtea Mobile): “Physical SIM will not disappear in my lifetime” — though it will keep shrinking as eSIM grows fast.
• Matas Čenys (Saily): largely gone from consumer markets in five to six years; longer for niche use cases.
• Jason Olivieri (Verizon): it ends when operators and OEMs stop supporting it — “a bit longer than two years.”

The takeaway

eSIM growth is real, but it’s not one market — it’s at least three (travel, consumer handset migration, IoT/automotive), each with different onboarding challenges, quality requirements, and timescales. The operators who treat them as one undifferentiated wave will misread both the opportunity and the investment it demands.

Hear the full panel — including the price-vs-quality debate in travel eSIM and how MNOs and connectivity partners should share quality intelligence.

Download the full webinar recording: The Hidden Challenge of eSIM