Japan's Soracom sells an eSIM that makes leaving easier. The Tokyo-listed IoT operator, now past 10 million lines, has put SGP.32 eSIMs on sale that can carry rival operators' profiles, betting its platform matters more than its network. Soracom, the Japanese IoT connectivity company that runs its own mobile service on top of other operators' networks, now sells eSIMs that let customers load a competitor's network profile alongside its own. The company made the SGP.32 eSIMs commercially available in July, in both plug-in card and soldered chip formats, together with the software that manages which network each device uses. Three weeks later, Soracom said its group had passed 10 million contracted lines, a count that includes cellular, Sigfox and LoRaWAN connections, and that customers outside Japan now account for 48% of its recurring revenue. The company, which listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2024 and is a consolidated subsidiary of Japanese telecom group KDDI, grew revenue by 38% in the year to March 2026. "Commercial availability means a customer can order a device today that activates through Soracom and has the capability to add and remove profiles in the field," said Kenta Yasukawa, Soracom's co-founder and chief technology officer. What Soracom is actually selling. That field capability rests on SGP.32, the GSMA's standard for managing eSIMs in devices that have no screen and no user, which Morning Tick explained in its look at the fight over who controls the IoT SIM. Soracom's version pairs the eSIM with its own remote manager, the eIM, and a service it calls the Connectivity Hypervisor, which lets customers add, remove and switch operator profiles through an API. A device can carry Soracom's own profiles, profiles from other mobile operators, or profiles from operators that have partnered with Soracom, and it falls back to Soracom's connectivity if another network fails. Soracom says the service works across more than 200 countries and territories, though it has not named its partner operators or published prices. Built for A requirement, not A trend. Soracom first opened pre-orders at MWC in March, when Yasukawa said that SGP.32 "is rapidly becoming a requirement in automotive and enterprise IoT RFPs." The company had tested the approach with Toyota through the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium, an industry group working on connected-car infrastructure, in a project that validated switching profiles on vehicles in the field. Why A network seller makes switching easier. Letting customers load a rival's network looks odd for a company whose revenue comes from connectivity, yet it answers a problem that single global SIMs keep hitting. Several countries ban permanent roaming, where a foreign SIM lives on a local network indefinitely: Brazil, Turkey and Nigeria prohibit it outright, while China, India and several Gulf states restrict it through data and numbering rules, as Soracom itself explained in a July guide to IoT roaming. A device that ships on a roaming SIM into one of those markets can work during a pilot and then drop off the network months later, and that failure lands on the customer. An eSIM that can take a local operator's profile over the air fixes the problem without a technician, and a vendor that offers it keeps the customer on its platform even when the traffic runs over someone else's network. That is the bet behind the product, because Soracom increasingly competes on the tools around the SIM, including device management, data routing into cloud services, and its new AI agent, which Morning Tick covered earlier this month. Counterpoint Research ranked Soracom a leader among 29 connectivity management platform vendors in April, citing its cloud-native design, and the company says Gartner also named it a leader in managed IoT connectivity this year. A crowded field within months. Soracom will not have the market to itself, since SGP.32 products have arrived from several directions this year. IDEMIA Secure Transactions, Tele2 IoT and Cisco launched an end-to-end SGP.32 service in March, Giesecke+Devrient and AT&T are supplying SGP.32 eSIMs for Rivian's R2 electric SUV, and in September Denmark's Onomondo and US provider Granite launched their own SGP.32 services, the two launches Morning Tick compared in its earlier piece. Each of those players starts from a different position: chip and SIM makers such as IDEMIA and G+D sell the secure hardware and the management server, operators such as Tele2 and AT&T sell the network, and independent platforms such as Onomondo promise to stay neutral between operators, whereas Soracom sells all of it at once: the eSIM, the remote manager, a network of its own to fall back on, and the software that sits on top. Satellite in the same account. Soracom also adds coverage that most rivals sell separately, having launched its satellite service with Skylo for general use in October 2025. Standard cellular devices that support satellite links can switch to Skylo's network from the same Soracom account, which means a customer could in principle run a local operator's profile, Soracom's own roaming profile and a satellite fallback on one device. What buyers still need to ask. The pitch is strong on paper, but the July release left several gaps that buyers will want filled before they commit. Soracom has not published prices for the eSIMs or for profile switching, it has not named the operators whose profiles it can load, and it has not said how much a customer pays to hold a rival's profile on a Soracom-managed device. The biggest question concerns control, because SGP.32 lets whoever runs the remote manager decide which profiles a device can use, and if that manager belongs to Soracom, the customer has swapped one form of dependence, on a network, for another, on a platform. Buyers should ask whether they can move their devices to a different remote manager later, and at what cost. The lock-in moves from the SIM to the software. Soracom's move shows where IoT connectivity is heading: the SIM itself is losing its power to tie a customer to one operator, so companies like Soracom now compete on the software that decides which network a device uses and what happens to its data afterwards. At 10 million lines and with nearly half its recurring revenue from abroad, Soracom has the scale to make that case outside Japan. For device makers planning a product that will ship worldwide and stay in the field for a decade, that shift is good news, since it turns connectivity into a choice they can revisit rather than a commitment they make once. The price is a new kind of loyalty, to the platform that holds the keys, so the smartest buyers will negotiate their exit terms from that platform before they sign.

Soracom targets connected-vehicle lifecycle management with Automotive Suite. Date: July 29, 2026 By Marc Kavinsky, Lead Editor at IoT Business News. Soracom Automotive Suite brings multicarrier connectivity management, remote IoT eSIM profile switching, in-car Wi-Fi handling and usage-based billing into a single API-driven platform for connected vehicles. Vehicle connectivity is not a one-time procurement decision. A car may remain in service for more than a decade, while the networks, regulations and commercial arrangements around it continue to change. That creates a particular problem for automakers: the connectivity profile embedded at production may not be the one the vehicle needs years later, especially if it is operating in another country or supporting a different mix of services. Soracom is addressing that lifecycle issue with the launch of Soracom Automotive Suite, a platform intended to manage connected-vehicle connectivity across telematics, infotainment and safety-related voice services such as automatic emergency calling in Europe. The suite is available now and is exposed through the Soracom API. The announcement is notable because it is not centered on a new vehicle module, a single carrier deal or an isolated telematics service. Soracom is positioning the suite as an operational control layer for connectivity after the vehicle has left the factory. That distinction matters in automotive IoT, where the technical challenge is less about initial activation than about keeping connectivity commercially and technically viable over the full operating life of the vehicle. At the core of the offering is Soracom Connectivity Hypervisor, which uses GSMA SGP.32 remote provisioning to download, add and switch operator profiles over the air on a single IoT eSIM. According to Soracom, a vehicle can activate on a Soracom profile and then move to a local or use-case-specific carrier profile depending on region, regulatory requirement or application need, with a Soracom-profile fallback built in. That approach makes the suite different from conventional roaming-led models. Rather than treating cross-border coverage as a static roaming arrangement, Soracom is emphasizing post-deployment profile orchestration. Its mobile core provides reach to more than 500 carriers across over 200 countries and territories, while Multi-Carrier Integration is designed to manage both Soracom and third-party carrier lines from one interface. The practical implication is that automakers could treat connectivity as an adjustable operational parameter rather than a fixed attribute of the vehicle. This does not eliminate the work of validating carrier behavior, regulatory obligations or service performance in each market. It does, however, create a mechanism for changing the connectivity relationship without physically replacing the SIM or managing each carrier line through a separate operational process. Soracom is also bundling commercial management into the automotive package. The suite includes Soracom In-Car Wi-Fi for managing the in-vehicle user experience, Soracom Consumer Billing for downstream end-user charging, and Soracom Split Billing to separate connectivity costs by usage type. The split-billing function uses multiple APNs and traffic analysis to distinguish between OEM telematics, operator services and end-user infotainment. That billing element is more than an accounting feature. Connected vehicles often carry traffic with different owners and revenue models over the same cellular connection. Safety and diagnostics data may be an OEM responsibility, while infotainment may be paid for by a driver or bundled through another provider. Separating those streams on a single SIM can reduce commercial ambiguity, but it also requires OEMs and integrators to define traffic classes clearly at the architecture stage. Why it matters for the IoT ecosystem. For OEMs, the suite offers a way to centralize control of connectivity policy across markets and vehicle functions through APIs. For tier-one suppliers and system integrators, it introduces a management layer that must be considered alongside embedded connectivity hardware and backend vehicle platforms. Connectivity providers, meanwhile, may find themselves incorporated as selectable operator profiles within a broader orchestration framework rather than serving as the sole management interface for an automaker. The broader industry relevance is tied to the maturation of connected mobility. Automotive IoT is moving beyond basic vehicle data upload toward a mix of regulated services, consumer connectivity and operational fleet intelligence. A platform that combines SGP.32-based profile management with billing separation reflects that shift: the connectivity stack is becoming both a technical dependency and a commercial control point. Soracom Enterprise Support, including 24/7/365 incident response for global operations, is also part of the suite. In an automotive context, support coverage is significant because connectivity incidents may affect multiple service categories at once, from diagnostics to user-facing connectivity. The value of the announcement will ultimately depend on how automakers and suppliers integrate these capabilities into their vehicle programs, but the direction is clear: connected-vehicle connectivity is becoming a lifecycle management problem, not just a network access problem.