Stephen SilverApple has jumped past Xiaomi to claim the top spot in wearables worldwide, and is on the cusp of a product refresh in the Apple Watch "Series 4" that should grow the lead even more.
According to the latest edition of the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Wearables Tracker, Apple shipped 4.7 million Apple Watches worldwide in Q2, making it the top wearable company in the world. Apple has a 17 percent market share, enough to overtake the previous leader, Xiaomi, who had 15.1 percent.
Fitbit came in third, with 9.5 percent, followed by Huawei and Garmin. Fitbit and other companies on the list make products in multiple wearable categories, whereas the Apple Watch is Apple's only wearable product.
Meanwhile, the overall wearable market grew 5.5 percent year-over-year, to 27.9 million units. But Apple grew even further, showing 38.4 percent year-over-year growth from the 3.4 million Watch shipments in the same quarter the year before to 4.7 million. Apple brought the cellular Apple Watch to several new countries, including Brazil, Mexico, and South Korea, in June.
"Apple maintained its position atop the wearables market with market-beating growth and continued demand for its LTE-enabled Watch," IDC said in the report. "This makes it a welcome addition to many telco channels worldwide. Now that the company has unveiled watchOS 5, it has also begun to chart out potential replacement cycles as the latest version of Apple's smartwatch platform will be compatible only with Series 1 and later."
A different survey released on August 31, from Counterpoint Research, looked more narrowly at the smart watch category. That found that Apple had 41 percent global market share for smart watches, 20 points more than the second-place brand, Fitbit.
The same survey also found that the Apple Series 1 was the most popular smart watch in the world, with Apple Series 3 coming in fourth. Apple is expected to unveil an updated Apple Watch at its "Gather Round" event on Sept. 12.
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44 Comments
Considering ASP is way higher than competitors, this is really amazing. I can't wait to replace my Series 2 with the Series 4 :#
Just wait until AW4 comes out, especially if that leaked picture is correct.
1) Damn! Even the cheap fitness tracker is losing out to expensive smartwatches in unit sales. This is the smartphones v dumb phone all over again after the iPhone was launched.
2) Love seeing the LTE models being such a strong market trend. Even if you don't ever activate it you probably still have access to emergency services which I think is a huge bonus for a wearable.
I'm happy with my Series 3. Bought it on a whim and I'm glad I did.
Look at the 118% growth of Huawei, which is in the chart, but not mentioned. It will be interesting to see where that goes. It’s also interesting to note that it’s Apple’s cheapest model that the most popular.