Nobody in this industry needs convincing that device compatibility matters. It’s one of the first things any operator checks before committing to an eSIM roadmap, and the logic is obvious enough that it barely gets debated: you cannot sell an eSIM plan to a phone that has no eSIM in it. What the Holafly Global eSIM Index does is put a number on how wide that constraint actually is across markets and, more interestingly, show how many markets have already cleared it and still aren’t converting. That second part is where the useful conversation is. The spread across the 50 markets analyzed is wider than I would have guessed. The United States and Canada sit at around 80% of active devices supporting eSIM. Estonia is at 65%, and markets like Finland, Switzerland, Singapore and South Korea are at 60%, with the UK and the Netherlands at 55%. At the other end there are markets at 15%, 10%, 8%. Half the sample sits at 40% or above, and roughly a quarter remains under 25%. Put in commercial terms, an operator in the bottom quartile is working with an addressable base three to five times smaller than a competitor in a top-quartile market, before a single decision about pricing, positioning or channel enters the picture.
Hardware availability vs. Market readiness
The Index also shows that similar hardware availability does not translate into similar readiness. Nine of the fifty markets analyzed sit at around 50% of eSIM-capable devices, and they are spread across the ranking rather than clustered together: Thailand is fourth overall, Germany eighth, Japan thirteenth, Sweden eighteenth, Chile thirty-third. The ranking is a composite, so those positions reflect operator offering, activation, regulation and expert assessment as well as devices, which is precisely the point. Once the hardware is comparable, everything else starts doing the work. And the explanations the Index offers for each of those markets are rarely about the devices themselves. It points to replacement cycles in Germany, now stretched to around 40 months, as one factor keeping a large share of the base on physical SIM. It associates Sweden’s slower conversion with an unusually active second-hand market that keeps low-cost handsets without eSIM in circulation, leaving a market where roughly half the devices are technically capable but only about a quarter of connections run on a digital profile. For Japan it identifies the provisioning model itself, with the stated priority for the year ahead being a move from pull to push. Estonia, at 65%, is credited with one of the fastest renewal cycles in its region at around 2.8 years.
The installed base mismatch
Here I want to be explicit that I’m moving from what the Index measures to what I think it means, because the two are different things. My reading, based on how operators talk about this internally rather than on anything in the data, is that there’s a persistent mismatch in how the industry assesses its own readiness. When operators evaluate where they stand on eSIM, they tend to look at the sales mix: what share of the handsets they sold this quarter is eSIM-capable. That figure usually looks excellent, often above 90% in mature markets. But new handsets are only a small slice of the phones in circulation. If a market has a hundred million active devices and sells twenty-five million a year, then even at 100% eSIM-capable sales, three quarters of the base is untouched at the end of the year. That’s what the Index measures: not what is being sold, but what people are actually carrying. Both figures are accurate and both are useful, but they answer different questions, and it’s worth being clear about which one you’re looking at when you assess how ready a market really is.
External catalysts driven by unrelated priorities
So if the installed base moves slowly, what shifts it? Looking at the markets that moved fastest, gradual adoption doesn’t seem to be the main mechanism. External events are. In the United States, Apple’s 2022 decision to remove the SIM tray from iPhones sold in that market is described in the Index as the definitive catalyst, and the eSIM-only installed base has since reached critical mass. In New Zealand, the Index points to the 3G switch-off now under way as a driver of large-scale device replacement, with the base shifting toward eSIM-capable handsets as a result. That second case comes with a caveat worth stating: a network shutdown forces people off incompatible phones, but what they buy instead determines whether the eSIM-capable share actually rises. The opportunity is real, the outcome isn’t automatic. And neither of these was an eSIM decision in origin. Apple was following its own hardware roadmap, and 3G shutdowns are driven by spectrum economics and network costs. The movement in penetration is a by-product, and in the case of a network shutdown it comes from a process that takes years to prepare and involves regulators as much as operators. That’s worth keeping in mind before treating either as a repeatable playbook.
Where the real operational friction lives
If you run a mobile business, that’s an uncomfortable conclusion, because the biggest movements in device penetration tend to come from outside your own commercial plan. But this is where the Index makes a useful distinction: how far a market can go and how far it actually goes are two different things, and only the first is constrained by hardware. Chile is the sharpest illustration. It has the highest device compatibility in Latin America by a wide margin, around 50%, roughly double what you see across most of the region, and it sits at #33. The hardware is increasingly available, and the Index describes a market moving toward an eSIM-first activation model, with activation at no cost to the user. What holds it back sits in the last step. Regulation requires biometric validation to prevent SIM swapping, and operators can resolve it remotely through liveness checks or by cross-referencing state databases, but when that verification fails the customer has to go to a branch. A remote-first process with a physical fallback is still a physical process for everyone who ends up in the fallback. Further hardware penetration would not, by itself, close that gap. The more direct opportunity is to improve the success rate of the remote verification path. That pattern repeats across the Index. Several markets note that operators still carry the cost of running a physical SIM channel alongside the digital one, Sweden and New Zealand among them, precisely because a meaningful share of the base can’t use anything else. What I find more telling is what the Index says about the United States, the market at the top of the ranking with 80% device penetration: operators there still commit retail resources to walking customers through activations that could have been completed digitally. That doesn’t mean hardware is irrelevant, and retail exists for plenty of other reasons besides activation support. But it does suggest that beyond a certain level of compatibility, activation and support become the more significant sources of friction.
Actionable levers for operators
Which leads to the observation I’d most want an operator to take from this, and here I’m speaking from experience rather than from the data. Operators do have levers on the renewal cycle, and they have used them for decades: handset subsidies, instalment plans, early upgrade offers, trade-in programmes. But shifting an entire installed base that way is slow and expensive, and in many markets subsidy budgets have been shrinking rather than growing. Capturing the renewals that are already happening costs far less. Every device upgrade is a discrete, dated, entirely predictable moment when a customer’s hardware changes and their profile has to be re-provisioned, and it’s one of the points in the journey where an operator has the most influence over the outcome, at least in channels it controls directly. What decides that outcome is usually mundane: whether the default provisioning path in the upgrade flow is eSIM or physical, whether the retail assistant has been trained and incentivised to offer it, whether the digital onboarding journey works well enough that a customer doesn’t abandon it halfway. In several markets I’ve looked at, the default still leans toward the physical SIM, often less by deliberate choice than because the process predates eSIM and hasn’t been rebuilt around it. So the way I’d summarize what the Index taught me is this. Device penetration deserves more attention than it gets, because it caps what any commercial strategy can achieve. But it is only the starting point. What separates a market that performs from one that underperforms is what happens once a compatible phone is already in the installed base, and while operators don’t control all of that, they control more of it than the hardware itself.
