Google Pixel Watch

It costs Google $123 to build a Pixel Watch, analysis shows

Ben Schoon | Mar 2 2023 - 9:32 am PT

After years of anticipation, Google finally released its first smartwatch last year in the Pixel Watch. But, according to a new analysis, it costs Google nearly half as much to build a Pixel Watch as it charges customers for the product.

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CounterPoint Research today published a bill-of-materials (BoM) analysis on the Google Pixel Watch, finding that the smartwatch costs Google roughly $123 to build in terms of the cost of the raw materials. That’s when looking at the LTE variant of the watch, which retails for $399 in the United States.

The bulk of the cost in building the Pixel Watch comes from its processing components, which take up roughly 27% of the total cost. Within that cost is the Exynos 9110 chipset provided by Samsung, as we were first to report last year. That chip is backed by a MIMXRT595S co-processor from NXP, as well as 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage provided by Kingstone.

The display (provided by BoE) and its cover glass (custom-made by Corning) are next on the list, making up over 17% of the total cost. The casing and waterproofing then eat up another 14.7%, with the sensors at 8.3% of the cost and the battery and charging components adding up to just over 6%.

Notably, the cellular components of the watch only make up about 5% of the total BoM cost, meaning the Wi-Fi only model likely isn’t significantly cheaper for Google to produce.

The difference between the retail cost of the Pixel Watch and the cost of its raw materials isn’t particularly large, either. Counterpoint highlights that the cost of the Pixel Watch is “a big leap” from previous Fitbit smartwatches. There’s no public mention of how much it costs Fitbit to make smartwatches such as the Sense or Versa, but they retail at $299 and $229 respectively. Counterpoint also previously published a BoM analysis for the OnePlus Watch, citing the cost at $68 while the wearable retails for $159. Much of the difference in the BoM versus the retail cost comes down to marketing as well as R&D costs.