Although the Apple company launched Apple Watch last year and managed to achieve amazing sales in the 12 months of product availability, for now smartwatches are not popular enough to overtake fitness bracelets in sales.
According to a recent study, more than 75% of wearables sold in the US are fitness bands, the rest being smartwatches, and more than half of these bands are produced by Fitbit, the only wearable manufacturer that sells more than Apple in this segment.
Those from Kantar conducted this study, and according to them, 12.2% of all consumers in the US own a wearable, so there is a very large market that Apple must conquer with the Apple Watch that it promotes so much a lot at the moment.
In the months of February and March, Fitbit generated half of the sales of wearables in the US, and the remaining 50% was shared between the other manufacturers, including the Apple company, a sign that its products still have a lot of news to bring before entering the bars users.
For both smartwatch and fitness band buyers – brand, ease of use, and functionality are the top drivers of purchase, outweighing both design and cost. Fitbit established itself as an early market leader, capturing 61.7 percent of the US installed base by communicating a clear and simple value proposition to consumers.
In Europe, things are much different, here wearables have a market share halved compared to that in the US, and Fitbit is a leader with a slight lead over other wearable manufacturers, including Apple or the Koreans from Samsung .
More precisely, Fitbit has 18.5% of the European market, while Apple and Samsung have 14% and 11.6%, respectively, but wearables still have a lot to prove before entering the prisons of the Europeans, or of many other nations on the the planet.
