Apple Led Wearables Market in Q1 2018 [Chart]

Apple led the wearables market in Q1 2018 shipping an estimated 3.8 million Apple Watches, reports Canalys.

Total wearable band shipments grew 35% year on year to 20.5 million units in the quarter. Xiaomi, whose Mi Bands account for over 90% of its shipments, followed Apple closely with 3.7 million units shipped. Rounding out the top five was Fitbit, Garmin and Huawei.

“Key to Apple’s success with its latest Apple Watch Series 3 is the number of LTE-enabled watches it has been able to push into the hands of consumers,” said Canalys Senior Analyst Jason Low. “Operators welcome the additional revenue from device sales and the added subscription revenue for data on the Apple Watch, and the list of operators that sell the LTE Apple Watch worldwide is increasing each month.”


Canalys says that the Apple has 59% of the total cellular-enabled smartwatch market.

“While the Apple ecosystem has a strong LTE watch offering, the lack of a similar product in the Android ecosystem is glaring. If Google decides to pursue the opportunity with a rumored Pixel Watch, it would jump-start much needed competition in this space.”

In terms of smartwatch competition, Garmin is now the second largest vendor after Apple, having shipped one million in the quarter.

“Garmin’s transition to smartwatches has been swift as it focuses its GPS expertise on catering to endurance athletes and outdoor enthusiasts,” said Vincent Thielke, Research Analyst at Canalys. “It brought much needed improvements by adding features such as Garmin Pay to the Forerunner and vívoactive series, and now offers onboard music storage on the latest Forerunner 645. While launching services is a great way to build stickiness, Garmin must ensure it continues to enhance them based on real use-cases. The exercise could prove costly should Garmin be the sole driver of such an ecosystem.”


More details in the full report linked below.

Read More