Apple Watch: The Undisputed Leader in the Segment

The third quarter of the 2019 calendar year saw a huge jump in the shipments and sales of smartwatches with Apple Watch by far the leader of the pack. The figures and statistics for the worldwide wearables market have been released by Strategy Analytics and these are quite revealing, to say the least.

Apple Holds on and Improves its Position

Apart from establishing that Apple has been able to retain its dominant position in the segment, the Q3 figures also indicate that Samsung is trying to build on its base in the smartwatch category and can improve further. Samsung has also overtaken Fitbit, to be in the second place. Fitbit comes down to the third slot. All the other players, like Garmin, Huawei, Xiaomi, and other small and localized brands constitute one block after the first three.

Now the actual figures and the percentages; the July-September 2019 quarter saw the shipments of smartwatches record a jump of 42% from 10 million units to 14.2 million units. Of the 14.2 million, Apple accounted for 6.8 million, or 51% with Samsung shipping 1.9 million, just over 13%. That is the kind of difference between the first placed Apple and Samsung.

In terms of the quarter to quarter growth, Apple increased its shipments by 51% from 4.5 million in Q2 this year to 6.8 million Apple Watches in Q3. Samsung’s figures were 1.1 million and 1.9 million, a jump of 73% from the previous quarter. There is a sense that the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 has led the sales of the wearables for the South Korean company. The trend is likely to continue.

From the market share perspective on the sales reported worldwide, Apple marginally increased its market share from 45% to 47.9% while Samsung went up from 11% to 13.4%. Fitbit slipped from 15% to 11.3%.

From the revenue perspective too, Apple managed to post better performance in the third quarter, thanks to the Apple Watch sales apart from the services. Revenues from iPhones were down since the new iPhones were released only towards the end of the quarter.

Google’s Takeover of Fitbit Can Change the Dynamics

The overall market expectation is that, with Google acquiring Fitbit as well as buying the hybrid technology from Fossil, there may be some exciting times ahead in the wearables market. It remains to be seen what kind of a strategy Google adopts. Technology and marketing are going to be the key factors in determining how the players fare in the marketplace. Google has all the advantages it needs to succeed, provided it plays its card right.