The global market for Fire Suppression Systems is expected to slump by -4.7% in the year 2020 in response to COVID-19 induced business and economic challenges and thereafter recover and grow to reach US$27.5 billion by the year 2027, trailing a post COVID-19 CAGR of 5.4% over the analysis period 2020 through 2027. Fire accidents are major disasters that can cause serious damage to property while endangering the lives of people. If not controlled timely, fires can spread to vast areas in a residential or non-residential location annihilating everything in their way. Numerous passive and active approaches are available to prevent, minimize or eliminate the otherwise devastating impact of a fire hazard. While passive methods focus on curbing the happening of fire events by using fire proof materials such as coatings, claddings and cement materials in construction of buildings, active methods rely on manual and automatic technologies integrated with alarm systems, evacuation tools and suppression equipment to identify fire in a site, evacuate people, and control and extinguish the fire. Fire suppression systems provide an effective means to ensure protection against fire. When used in combination with fire alarm systems and smoke detectors, they provide safety to people and aid in minimizing asset damage. Automatic fire suppression systems are basically fire safety equipment, which integrate sensors, detectors and fire suppression materials such as water, gaseous agents, foam, wet agents or dry chemicals to identify a fire event in a building or facility, and extinguish and control spread of fire.

With heavy dependence on the construction sector, demand for fire suppression systems is coming under severe pressure as weak economic environment on account of disruptions due to COVID-19 outbreak considerably brings down the momentum in the construction activity in residential, commercial enterprise, hospitality, healthcare, institutional, and industrial sectors. Factors such as supply chains disruptions; shortage of building materials, subcontractors, and workers; and the termination of contracts to control expenses are all wielding considerable pressure on residential as well as non-residential construction projects. Uncertainty in the housing sector as is evident through considerable drop in housing starts and permits clearly demonstrate the headwinds for the industry. While residential segment remains highly affected segment, the industrial and commercial segments also remain affected as the turmoil created by the epidemic remains massive on industrial enterprise operations, commercial enterprise activity and also hospitality and travel & tourism sectors. The slowdown in construction activity coupled with weak economic scenario is likely to lessen the demand for fire suppression systems globally. Lockdowns and restrictions imposed in the first half of 2020 resulted in drop in fire safety equipment installations and services due to restricted access to customer sites. Vendors of fire safety equipment and fire suppressions systems continue to suffer from supply chains disruptions, shortage of materials, labor availability, and termination of previously contracts by clients to minimize expenses. Acknowledging the substantial slowdown in demand for fire suppression systems, industry associations, regulatory bodies and major participants are taking various initiatives to minimize the negative impact of the crisis on fire safety industry. For instance, the American Fire Sprinkler Association (AFSA) has decided to roll back a previously adopted dues increase, to reduce the burden on member entities.

In the post COVID-19 period, growth will be driven by increased use of IoT in fire safety which has potential to offer immense safety and efficiency benefits. Wireless cellular networks or low-power wide area networks (LPWAN) can seamlessly transmit a wide range of data from IoT devices to help in prevention and suppression of fire. IoT sensors can effectively integrate with various devices such as fire suit technologies, alarms, radio-frequency identification (RFID) trackers, and personal safety devices for tracking firefighters and providing incident commanders with situational visibility and awareness about the position of individual firefighters during their fight with the blaze. These solutions can be potentially embedded into firefighting gear to reveal locations of the firefighter at any point in time; and generate real-time information about several other parameters to incident commanders and emergency command centers, while assuring two-way communication with on-site firefighting teams. Sophisticated IoT sensors such as heat-proof sensors can resourcefully communicate the origin point of fire, the intensity and nature of fire and the spreading patterns, and also information about occupants in the fire zone. Accurate real-time information about the events going on at the hazard site empowers streamlined and synchronized firefighting and evacuation efforts, while potentially reducing the property damage and human casualties. Furthermore, IoT-enabled personal alert safety system allows detection of firefighter motion through an acoustic transmitter that functions as a beacon to precisely locate the firefighter. Such IoT monitoring systems may potentially incorporate sensors to gauge body temperature, heart rate, volume flow rate, gas pressure, and acoustic impact, among others. Also, environment friendly sophisticated watermist fire suppression systems will come to the fore to substantially improve the fire safety in residential buildings. Watermist systems use small droplets of water and enhance the surface area of the suppressant material to help reduce the oxygen and temperature at the flame front of the fire, eventually curbing the spread of the fire. Watermist consumes much of the energy of fire while converting water into steam, thereby minimizing the room temperature in the region of the fire. The technology produces large amounts of inert steam and minimizes smoke and toxic gases locally, by bringing down temperatures, eliminating oxygen, and slowing the oxidation reactions of the fire.