With a 35% share, Apple continues to dominate the wearable market that include smartwatches, smart bands, fitness trackers and headphones.
During the third quarter of the year, according to research firm IDC, the Cupertino company shipped approximately 29.5 million units of Apple Watch, AirPods and Beats headphones. An important quantity that takes on a decidedly greater value if compared to the 10 million units shipped in the same period last year.
Apple’s growth in this sector, year on year, was 195.5% with a market share increased by 12 percentage points. The greatest merit of this remarkable increase would be due to the so-called “hearables”, practically “enhanced” headphones and similar products, which include both the AirPods and the Beats earphones.
This is the comment of Ramon T. Llamas, research director for IDC’s Wearables Team:
“Hearables have become the new go-to product for the wearables market. This began with multiple vendors removing the headphone jack from their smartphones, driving the move toward wireless headphones. It continued with hearables incorporating additional features that either augment or expand the audio experience. Next, hearables have taken on multiple form factors – ranging from truly wireless to over-the-ear headphones – appealing to a broad base of earwear user preferences. Finally, prices have come down significantly, with some reaching below $20.”
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Xiaomi comes second
Things went very well for Xiaomi too. The Chinese producer, in fact, placed second in the quarter in question with 12.4 million units shipped which allowed it to obtain a market share of 14.6%, an increase of 66.1% compared to 7.4 million units shipped in 2018. The leading product for Xiaomi was certainly the Mi Band which exceeded 10 million units shipped in the quarter.
In third and fourth place are Samsung and Huawei. Which recorded, respectively, a growth of 156.4% and 202.6% on an annual basis. Samsung shipped 8.3 million units, corresponding to a market share of 9.8%, Huawei reached 7.1 million devices shipped which allowed it to obtain a 8.4% share.
Fitbit, recently acquired by Google, has shipped 3.5 million units, corresponding to a 4.1% global market share.
Overall, according to IDC, earphones have seen impressive growth of around 40.7 million units shipped. Representing 48.1% of the worldwide wearable device market. Year on year, this is an increase of 242.4%. Smart bands, on the other hand, have reached 19.2 million shipments with smartwatches around 17.6 million units.
