• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, November 13, 2015

Beacons continue to be one of the most distributed of connected objects and some new stats highlight some of the growth across consumer categories.

Beacon shipments in the U.S. already passed a million units last year, according to ABI Research, with projections of the number passing 400 million within five years, as I wrote about here a few months back (Big Beacon Revenue to Come from Advertising).

Now come some stats from Sensoro, a two-year-old Chinese beacon company, which has deployed 110,000 beacons in Asia.

During Chinese holidays, traffic at the locations with beacons reached hundreds of millions. For example, beacons are installed on 260 high-speed trains, which carried more than 300 million passengers to holiday destinations.

Beacons at a jewelry store chain brought in $11 million in revenue with conversion rates of more than 60%, according to Sensoro.

Interestingly, the deployment of beacons in China is widely dispersed beyond traditional retail stores. Here are the locations with beacons:

• 16 airports
• 25 mobile theaters
• 39 high-end retail stores
• 40 major tourist destinations
• 200 universities
• 260 high-speed trains
• 1,500 Pizza Hut restaurants
• 2,100 Chow Tai Fook jewelry stores

As more beacons are deployed, efficiencies of scale in beacon production come into play.

"Sensoro’s success in China is further validation of the growing beacon marketing industry,” said Hilmi Ozguc, founder and CEO of Boston-based Swirl. “By beacon-enabling WeChat (China’s largest social app), retailers in China are able to use their beacons to engage with a massive audience of consumers while they shop in their stores.  As some of the larger app publishers in the U.S. follow the same path, retailer deployment of beacons will accelerate even faster." 

Massive beaconed audiences are being created as beacons pop up all over the world, helping to identify what information should be sent to which person, based on location and other contextual issues.

The ultimate value may in the insights that marketers receive as a result of all those interactions.