Apple is leading the way in the smartwatch market according to Canalys (Wareable)
Tim Cook might be keeping schtum about the official sales figures for the Apple Watch but that hasn’t stopped the analyst brigade from playing the guessing game.
The latest forecaster to have a punt is Canalys, who has estimated that the Cupertino company shipped 12 million smartwatches in 2015 – a figure it claims is worth two-thirds of the total smartwatch market.
Back in November, Canalys reported that Apple had shipped 7 million smartwatches since its April launch, a figure it said was “in excess of all other vendors’ combined shipments over the previous five quarters.”
Its newest estimate, of 5 million more shipments over the Holiday period, apparently puts Apple leaps and bounds ahead of its closets rivals Samsung and Pebble.
However, Canalys’ figure doesn’t tally with what we heard from Gartner last week. Its latest wearable tech report said that 30.32 million smartwatches were sold last year, a figure it said will grow to 66.71 million by 2017.
For Apple Watch sales forecasts for 2015, we saw numbers ranging from 9 million to 30 million. Throw in a recent report from Juniper Research, which claimed that the Apple Watch made up 52% of smartwatch shipments in 2015, and you’ve got a confusing bunch of figures to say the least.
In Apple’s most recent earnings call, Tim Cook once again refused to spill the beans on the official numbers for the watchOS smartwatch, simply stating that the company had set a new quarterly record for Watch sales, and revealing that distribution of the wearable device had expanded to almost 12,000 locations in 48 countries.
According to Canalys, the other winners in the wearable space were Fitbit, Garmin and Xiaomi; who it claims are leading the way in the ever-expanding fitness band market, which it estimates hit 37 million shipments in 2015.
“Strong holiday shipments for Fitbit, Apple and Garmin drove growth of over 60% sequentially for all wearable bands. Across the entire wearable bands segment, Fitbit led all vendors in Q4, followed by Apple and Xiaomi,” reads the report.
Fitbit has revealed two new trackers already in 2016 – the Blaze and the Alta – with the former somewhat unfairly being compared to the Apple Watch.
