Apple Watch Seizes 63% of Global Smartwatch Market

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 3:15PM EST · Published Feb 2, 6:20AM EST

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Apple Watch Seizes 63% of Global Smartwatch Market — © courtesy of Apple Inc.

The global smartwatch market is not nearly as big as often predicted. Total shipments for the final quarter of 2016 were only 8.2 million units, up 1% from last year. Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) smartwatch accounted for 5.2 million, or 63%, of those shipments. On that basis, the Apple Watch will not be the next iPhone.

Samsung, in second place, barely shipped any inventory at all — just 800,000 units, for a share of 10%. That was down from 1.3 million units shipped in the fourth quarter of the previous year. All these data come from a new study by Strategy Analytics.

Cliff Raskind, director at Strategy Analytics, said:

We estimate Apple shipped a record 5.2 million smartwatches worldwide and captured a dominant 63 percent marketshare in Q4 2016, rising a steady 2 percent annually from 5.1 million units in Q4 2015. Demand for Apple’s new Watch Series 2 as a holiday-season gift in Western markets was surprisingly strong and it enabled Apple to clear a large backlog of smartwatch inventory during the quarter.

Now that the holidays are over, the company has to contend with Apple Watch sales in a less festive market.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.