The latest smartwatch market report is out, but unlike the typical quarterly research papers ranking the world’s top vendors by unit sales, this one focuses primarily on the industry’s revenue numbers generated during the year’s first six months.
Unsurprisingly, Apple towers above its increasingly aggressive rivals in this key metric too, accounting for more than half of the market’s global revenues between January and June 2020, up from “only” 43.2 percent in the same period of last year.
The Cupertino-based tech giant also impressively managed to boost its shipment volumes by 22 percent year-on-year even as the industry on the whole was “flat” from this particular standpoint due to the coronavirus pandemic. For what it’s worth, COVID-19 couldn’t stop the market from improving its revenue haul, which means worldwide average selling prices were actually on the rise during H1 2020.
Apple was obviously a major contributing force to that healthy 20 percent progress, as the company’s costly Series 5 topped the best-selling smartwatch model charts, followed by the older and cheaper Series 3, the late 2019-released Huawei Watch GT 2, Samsung’s own H2 2019 Galaxy Watch Active 2 variant, and something called the Imoo Z3 4G.
Considering that order, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Huawei moved ahead of Samsung on the overall revenue table, but believe it or not, Garmin managed to snatch the silver medal thanks to “one of the broadest portfolios of smartwatches in the market.”
Interestingly, the fitness-centric Forerunner and Fenix families are highlighted as the brand’s strongest performers rather than mainstream Apple Watch alternatives like the single Venu model or Vivoactive lineup.
Garmin’s success is perhaps that much more surprising when considering Fitbit’s struggles, given that the two companies have always been engaged in a very direct and fierce battle that the latter brand dominated for a fairly long time.
At least in the smartwatch segment, Fitbit has been left behind, edging out Fossil but narrowly losing sixth place in global revenue to Amazfit, which was the world’s fastest-growing brand of H1 2020. Speaking of Fossil, we should probably point out that Google’s Wear OS platform “continues to account” for 10 percent of the total smartwatch market, which is… actually not as bad as we would have guessed. It’s definitely bad, but it could be even worse.
Source: Phonearena
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