Apple, Huawei & Samsung increase their share of global smartwatch market
Apple, Huawei and Samsung have increased their global smartwatch market share. This is according to Counterpoint research which compared stats in Q3 2020 to the same period last year.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, smartwatch shipments have been doing well. Year-on-year they increased by 6% in the last quarter. The top 5 brands generated a whopping two-thirds of the total, up from 58% in Q3 2019. This shows the big companies are getting bigger, while the smaller brands are struggling to maintain their market share.
The winners and losers
Unsurprisingly, Apple is top of the pops. The Cupertino outfit managed to increase their global smartwatch market share by 2% to 28%. Even more impressive is the fact that at $2.3 billion, it accounted for nearly half of shipments by value.
We saw the release of Series 6 and Watch SE in September. The new devices have, no doubt, helped Apple improve their share. We expect strong sales to continue in the all-important holiday period.
Huawei has, however, narrowed the gap with Apple. It saw a one-third increase in market share from 10% to 15%. The strong performance came on the heel of the release of Huawei Watch ES and the more high-spec Watch GT2 Pro.
The final strong performer was Samsung. On the back of Galaxy Watch 3, the Korean outfit jumped to third place in the rankings capturing 10% of the global smartwatch market. BBK (a Chinese maker of children’s smartwtaches) fell to fourth place.
A few other brands have also done well. Fitbit, BBK, Amazfit, Garmin and Fossil largely retained their share. The big losers, however, were the smaller brands which saw their share of the market slump from 32% to 23%. That is a huge decline in just one year. In an increasingly competitive market, we feel it will become more difficult for smaller companies to compete against the big boys.
Geographical breakdown
As far as geographical distribution, China has been steadily increasing smartwatch shipments. These reached a record 30.2% share of the global market in Q3 2020, and the country overtook the US in the past three months to become the market leader. Counterpoint Research says that China’s strong performance was fueled by normal smartwatch shipments. Before it was mostly a result of strong sales of children’s wearables.
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