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 we explained in our 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 we 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 we compared in our 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.
