The technological world is coming out strongly marked by the Coronavirus. Economically, there will be many companies that will suffer from much lower revenues, with users who will be much more careful in their purchases. Many sectors have already been penalized, first of all that of smartphones, with an overall expected drop in the market.
Yet there is a sector that seems not to have been affected by all this and that indeed has significantly raised its value, with the purchases that in the last three months have grown by 20%. We are talking about smartwatches, increasingly desired and increasingly sold, even while the rest of the technological sector is struggling. That these devices are considered useful in times like these?
The numbers
The data is incontrovertible. The smartwatch sector is the only one in consumer technology to have registered a increase in sales figures for the last quarter, what coincided with the worldwide explosion of the Coronavirus pandemic. This was revealed by a Strategy Analytics research that analyzed the sector's sales figures in the first quarter of this year compared to those of 2019. If 11.4 million smartwatches had sold last year during this period , this year the figure touched altitude 13.7 million: a 20% increase, absolutely unexpected given the lockdown that has affected many countries and the economic crisis due to the spread of the virus and the contraction of the labor market.
These are surprising numbers, with the online market dominating it, also considering the closure of the physical stores. It seems quite clear that, in times like these, users rate these products as the most useful on a technological level, much more than any other object.
Quotes
At the company level, the changes in market shares between the various companies are slight. Apple with its Watch still dominates user preferences. His is undoubtedly the most loved and desired watch, the one perceived as the best. The company has shipped 7.6 million units worldwide in the past three months, with a + 22.6% an increase compared to the 6.2 million Apple Watch sold in the first quarter of 2019. Globally this translates to a market share of 55% compared to 54 last year.
Growing numbers also for Samsung arrived to ship 1.9 million smartwatches compared to 1.7 million a year ago, but with a market share that has fallen, albeit minimally, from 15 to 14%. However, the company remains the second market force, closely followed by Garmin, whose third place is an absolute novelty compared to the past. For two years the company has not occupied the bottom step of the podium, the result of 1.1 million products sold and a jump of 38% compared to 0.8 million in 2019.
The counterpart of smartphones
Numbers that become even more impressive when compared with those of the technology sector most interconnected with smartwatches, that of smartphones. The mobile phone market is experiencing a rather sharp drop in sales. A contraction, already for some time endemic, which is experiencing a rather important peak due to Coronavirus. Already in February, when the pandemic began to make the first signs of the crisis heard, shipments fell by 38% compared to 2019.
In general, a drop in sales has occurred in Europe which fluctuates between -10% and -16.5% for a contraction that, according to analysts, will have a further collapse of 15% in the coming months. With the stores that have recently reopened and the purchasing power often limited by the labor and economic crisis, smartphones are today considered a non-essential good, an expense not to be faced in the short term for an object that, in any By chance, many already own and which, at the technological level, has not offered news worthy of note for some time.
The trump card of wearables
If on the one hand smartphones are devices already widely owned by users and for this reason even less necessary in periods of economic downturn, the perception that one has of smarwatches is very different. There is talk of products still not widely distributed among users, with a large slice of the market to be filled and with functions perceived as essential in this period. The closure of the physical stores did not prevent smartwatches from being purchased, with the online stores having seen their orders multiplied clearly.
An important key in this growth is mainly due to a greater attention of users towards health. Smartwatches are seen as the most suitable tools to preserve it, given the continuous monitoring of many important parameters and the ability to always keep under control your physical activity, even this has become a priority in times of forced sedentary lifestyle.
Everyone has become more attentive to these two aspects and forecasts say that in the future users will be even more: if the emergency continues as expected for a long time, it will become essential for consumers to always have devices on their wrist that make them feel safer, who prove themselves to be little virtual health assistants.
A promising future
It must also be said that, at least at a technological level, the smartwatch remains the last bulwark of novelties, the house in which the greatest concentration of what is seen as technological novelties resides. In a period where smartphones continue to come out with similar shapes and characteristics, in which each device flattens itself and the difference in the common use between top of the range and lower-end devices is getting thinner and thinner, wearables are opening their doors to numerous innovations, with products for all price ranges, with ever new features and a much fresher and more innovative design.
New objects, to show off and show off and with functions considered much more useful than the now classic ones of the "older brothers". Of course, all of this is not destined to last forever and when technology reaches its peak and the market begins to become saturated, sales will contract accordingly.
However, that moment still seems quite far away and what we are experiencing, at a technological level, will still be remembered for a long time as the era of wearable devices. We will all have one, as we all have a smartphone in our hands. Coronavirus will only accelerate a process that has been in the air for some time.
