The impact of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has many consumers keeping their wallets shut, but that surprisingly didn’t stop the smartwatch market from growing considerably in Q1 2020. However, that Q1 2020 growth didn’t touch Google’s Wear OS or Fitbit either.
A report from Canalys today estimates that the smartwatch market as a whole grew by 12% year-over-year despite… well everything that’s happened in the past few months. For once, though, that growth wasn’t driven by the Apple Watch, which actually lost considerable market share in the past year and shipped fewer units in Q1 2020.
Rather, it was Samsung, Garmin, and Huawei that helped the global smartwatch market grow. Samsung and Garmin both saw solid growth year-over-year, shipping hundreds of thousands of more units in Q1 2020 versus the same period in 2019. Huawei, though, more than doubled its market share over the past year, managing to ship 2.1 million smartwatches in Q1 2020.
What about Google’s efforts in the smartwatch market? Wear OS, as usual, is nowhere to be found in Q1 2020’s top 5. It’s possible that bigger brands such as Fossil made up a portion of the 2 million-unit growth in the “Others” category, but there’s no data to specifically indicate.
Unfortunately, Q1 2020 wasn’t good news for Fitbit, either. Google is still working out details regarding its purchase of Fitbit, but in this latest quarter, the brand only managed to push roughly 900,000 units, down from the 1.1 million units it shipped in Q1 2019. Ouch.
More on Smartwatches:
- Google buys Fitbit for $2.1 billion with ‘opportunity to invest even more in Wear OS’
- The best smartwatches for Android you can buy today
- Fitbit app reveals work on Google Assistant support, presumably for Versa 2
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