IDC: China's Security Hardware Market Size to Decline 6.5% YoY by 2024
DeepSeek+Security
Beijing, March 19, 2025
The latest China Security Hardware Market Tracking Report for Q4 2024, published by International Data Corporation (IDC), shows that the overall China security hardware market generated revenues of approximately RMB 8.04 billion (US$1.12 billion) in Q4 2024, down 11.9% year-on-year. By the end of 2024, the full-year China security hardware market reached RMB 21.02 billion (USD 2.92 billion), down 6.5% year-on-year.
The network security hardware market as defined by IDC consists of Unified Threat Management (UTM), UTM Firewall based on UTM platforms, Secure Content Management (SCM), Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP), Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and Traditional Firewalls, respectively.
The key vendors in the China cybersecurity hardware market in 2024 perform as follows:
*Special Note: Since the traditional firewall market size is currently shrinking, the following chart has no traditional firewall key vendor-related content; in addition, there may be minor errors in the figures due to rounding.) :
Based on the analysis of the data as well as the market, IDC believes that China's security hardware market will mainly perform as follows in the fourth quarter of 2024:
China's security hardware market declined at an increased rate in Q4 2024, down 11.9% year-on-year, with pressure increasing further from Q4 2023 (yoy: -5.5%);
The UTM firewall market remained No. 1, with revenue of approximately RMB 2.81 billion in Q4 2024; the overall market share of UTM category hardware, as a rigid product, increased for five consecutive years, from 62.5% in 2020 to 67.3% in 2024. The market share concentration (CR4) of the head vendors in this category has likewise increased over the past three years;
The VPN market grew 4% year-over-year in the fourth quarter and 1.6% year-over-year for the full year, making it the only positive growth segment in the security hardware market in 2024;
The secure content management and IDP markets declined -17.1% and -18.7% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, respectively.
Analyst Views
Xueqing Zhang, senior analyst at IDC China, said that in the fourth quarter of 2024, the market continued its downward trend, with revenue accounting for 38.2% of the year's share, a decline of nearly two percentage points compared to 2023. The main pressures facing the market are the tightening of user budgets, product homogenization, and a shift in focus of enterprise construction. Looking ahead to 2025, the introduction of DeepSeek's big model promotes the blowout development of AI applications. While reshaping the global AI landscape, it also brings more growth space for China's cybersecurity industry. As far as security vendors are concerned, DeepSeek's access will, to a certain extent, reverse the status quo of high investment cost and long return cycle of the existing security model, and will further empower security technology and help vendors realize qualitative changes in threat detection and security operations. From the demand side, DeepSeek's accelerated landing on the user side will lead to new application scenarios, but also in the infrastructure, data, applications, terminals, and other levels of derivatives of the new security risks, security protection needs have expanded. IDC believes that the emergence of DeepSeek pulls up the security technology ceiling, promoting incremental market demand, and spawned such as DeepSeek security, all-in-one machine, large model application security protection, and security technology. All-in-one machine, large model application security protection and other new security products. "AI+Security" is the absolute focus of the industry's attention in 2025, and a new direction for the industry to break through.
