Apple Watch prompts boom in smartwatch shipments

Following Apple’s quarterly report earlier this week which pointed at Apple Watch as one of the reasons behind the firm’s ongoing revenue growth, analyst house Strategy Analytics (SA) has revealed its numbers for the growing smartwatch market.

At the quarterly conference call, Tim Cook said a lot about the impressive launch of Apple’s debut product in the wearables market, yet didn’t disclose specific numbers.

“We started taking preorders in nine countries on April 10, and demand immediately exceeded supply by a wide margin,” he said. “In just the past few days, we’ve been able to catch up with demand, enabling us to expand Apple Watch availability to a total of 19 countries.”

SA has now said the first quarter of trading for Apple Watch saw roughly 4 million units shipped globally, and jumping straight in with 75.5% of the smartwatch market – which unsurprisingly grew by 457.3% year-on-year. Neil Mawston, executive director at the analyst firm said pressure is firmly on tech industry rivals like Samsung to up their game.

“We estimate Apple Watch shipped 4.0 million units and captured a dominant 75 percent smartwatch market share worldwide in Q2 2015,” he said. “Apple Watch launched in sixteen major countries and saw decent take-up from iPhone loyalists in the United States and elsewhere. Apple Watch has clearly raised the bar for the global smartwatch industry. The ball is now in the court of rivals, like Samsung, to respond.”

Rajeev Nair, meanwhile reckons Samsung will have to take a scatter gun approach across multiple markets where Apple has a less dominant grip in order to regain market share – with Samsung in second place in the market with 7.5% share.

“We estimate Samsung shipped 0.4 million smartwatches and captured 8 percent market share worldwide for second position,” he said. “Apple and Samsung together account for 8 in 10 of all smart watches shipped globally. However, Samsung is a long way behind Apple and it will need to launch multiple new smartwatch models and apps across dozens of countries if it wants to reduce Apple’s global smartwatch leadership in the coming months.”

Below is SA’s tracker for the blossoming smartwatch market.