Trending this month

Trending this month
Showing posts with label Fitness bands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fitness bands. Show all posts

December 9, 2016

FitBit takeover of Pebble without their hardware stumps analytics and investors alike

  /     /  
Top 5 Wearable Vendors Marketshare: FitBit,Xiaomi and Apple Lead the stakes(IDC data)

 
After days of speculations and rumors on Pebble and Fitbit takeover talks, Fitbit has finally announced that it is acquiring ” wearable smartwatches manufacturer Pebble .On December 7, 2016, Fitbit officially announced that they acquired assets from Pebble, including key personnel, as the company decided to stop producing wearable technology.However this does not include the hardware from Pebble.

While this seemed like a good news for both as Pebble was struggling to gain market share in the wearable industry and might have suffered in the future and may have gone under without an exit plan. However a few analysts are pointing out that the takeover plan by Fitbit does not make much strategic alignment not a very good  fit as it does not include pebble’s famed”Hardware”. Considering Pebble’s hardware is what helped the company build a following in the first place, not owning the hardware part  for Fitbit is like killing the product and stopping innovation

Post this takeover Fitbit risks not only disappointing the thousands of loyal fans that believed in Pebble despite the odds but also leaves them high and dry .According to endgadget, Fitbit now plans discontinue many of  Pebble wearable which was supposed to be launched in the next quarter.
They includes all the devices that were listed in the company’s latest Kickstarter campaign including The Time 2 and the Core -a GPS-enabled accessory for runners, both promised for next year — will never ship. If you ordered a Pebble 2 or a special Kickstarter Edition of the Time Round and haven’t received it yet, you won’t get one. Pebble has said all Kickstarter preorders will be refunded within the next week.

During Q3,2016 quarter, Fitbit shipped 11% more fitness bands than it did in the year-earlier quarter, upping its share of the market to 23% from 21.4% in the year-earlier period, according to IDC. However, shipments rose just 3% industry wide, marking a stark deceleration from 67% in the first quarter and 26% in the second quarter of 2016. Last month, Fitbit provided a revenue outlook for the holiday quarter between $725 million and $750 million, which was sharply below the $985 million analysts had forecast in a FactSet survey.Analysts have since tempered their expectations, as many VC’s and Investors alike now believe that product category has failed to convince consumers that these are must-have products the way, say, smartphones have.




November 3, 2016

16% US consumers own a smartwatch followed by western europe with 8%

  /     /  



 
With  the increasing  brands of smartwatches being launched, it would be interesting to see how much smartwatches the world has been buying. Post Apple and Samsung launched their own range of Smartwatches,North American and Europe has seen the highest number of smartwatches  being gobbled up.Significantly  one theory that many of us had predicted is coming true, traditional watched have been loosing out in this battle . Atleast recent data  from kantar media shows that for the three months ending July 2016, 20% of recent smartwatch buyers in the US made a purchase to replace a classic timepiece, rising to 30% in European Union

According to Kanta Media  data for q2,2016  shows that 15.2% of US consumers own either a smartwatch or fitness band, with the EU following behind at 8.1% penetration.
Within the smartwatch category only, excluding fitness bands, adoption remains low with 4.7% ownership in the US and 3.2% in EU.Apple dominated this segment with a 33.5% share, although that lead shrank slightly in the last three months as the market awaited the Apple Watch Series 
The EU4 countries show a similar trend to that of the US, with 38.6% of all sales coming in the smartwatch category, with Apple leading at 31.8%. Europe’s big four markets include Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy.

However shipments of smartwatches are likely to soar to double digits. Also coupled with the fact is that wearble’s are sitting on a huge cash pile.  ready to witness a massive adoption. Recent Businessinsider estimates smartwatch shipments will rise by a compound annual rate of 41% over the next five years. Smartwatches will account for 59% of total wearable device shipments this year, and that share will expand to just over 70% of  the $126million shipments by 2019.

July 26, 2016

which countries are swallowing up the wearables market

  /     /  
The below chart shows how the wearable devices market is expected to grow in the next 5 years. 2015 compared to 2020 between 2015 and 2020

WHICH NATONS ARE DEVOURING UP THE WEARABLES  MARKET 


Asian pacific market will outgrow all other geographies  with 194 million shipments of wearable devices, which includes,Smartwatches, Fitness bands, Apparel trackers and eyewear among others.North America and Western Europe are the next biggest market with shipments of 188 million and 127 million wearble devices  respectively, followed by   Central and Eastern Europe  with 45 million shipments and Latin American with  26 million shipments 

However the  Wearables segment the biggest demand is expected tocome from smartwatches and fitness bands  The biggest market pull  in Wearables will come from Asia pacific regions with China, Singapore and Hong Kong leading the growth for smartwatch and fitness bands adoption which will have the hihest penetration the highest wearble penetration . Smartwatches and smart eyewear and ear tracking devices are likely to see huge growth in Japan and South Korea