The International Data Corporation (IDC) has just estimated how the last quarter, and the last year, were for sales of wearable tech. Over the year, sales of wearable devices were up by 10.3% over 2016.
It’s worth noting that the year before had seen a much bigger sales increase, up 27.3%, but as Ramon T Llamas, research director for the wearables team at IDC, pointed out, ‘The slowdown is not due to a lack of interest – far from it. Instead, we saw numerous vendors, relying on older models, exit the market altogether. At the same time, the remaining vendors – including multiple start-ups – have not only replaced them, but with devices, features, and services that have helped make wearables more integral in people's lives. Going forward, the next generation of wearables will make the ones we saw as recently as 2016 look quaint.’
IDC also commented that Apple benefited from an increased sophistication in consumer tastes. Senior research analyst Jitesh Ubrani pointed out, ‘Although prices for individual products has slowly declined, consumer preferences have shifted to more sophisticated devices and towards well recognized brands. It's due to this that the wearables market has seen healthy double-digit growth in average selling prices since 2016.’
The top five wearables companies for the last quarter of 2017 are revealed in IDC’s analysis. Apple is in pole position, followed by Fitbit, Xiaomi, Garmin and Huawei. Apple saw a whopping 57.5% growth over the fourth quarter of 2016, Garmin posted a smaller, 4.7% growth and Fitbit and Xiaomi were both down in terms of shipment volumes.
The biggest percentage growth came from Huawei which almost doubled what it had sold in the quarter ending 2016 – shipments were up 93.2%.
In raw figures, Huawei was coming from a lower base and sold 1.6 million this time around. Apple, however, was the real seller, with 8 million Watches sold in the last quarter.
Apple itself doesn’t release figures, but Tim Cook recently said the Apple wearables business, which also includes AirPods and Beats headphones, was approaching the size of a Fortune 300 company. These new figures seem to be in line with that.
MacRumors even went to IDC for more details, relating specifically to smartwatches rather than the whole wearables sector. In that narrower space, IDC estimates that in the last quarter, Apple’s 8 million sales represent almost 61% of the market. Fitbit only began shipping smartwatches recently – IDC defines this in terms of gadgets which run third-party apps natively – and its last quarter saw sales of 0.5 million.
The figures are also striking for the whole of 2017. IDC says Apple sold 17.7 million, more than half of all smartwatches. Samsung was next largest company, with 3.6 million sold across the year.
So what does this all mean?
Well, Apple Watches aren’t cheap, so the company is earning a lot of money from a gadget which only first went on sale in Spring 2015. And it gives credence to something Tim Cook claimed in September when he announced the Apple Watch Series 3. Previously, he said, Apple had been the second biggest watchmaker in the world, behind Rolex.
Now, he claimed, it had risen to the number one position.
Since the Sunday Times has recently insisted that Apple Watch has outsold the entire Swiss watch industry, it’s clear that the Apple Watch is going from strength to strength.
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