Overview:
The global smartwatch market continued to contract in Q1 2023 following an 8% YoY decline in Q4 2022 while the 121% growth in India's shipments managed to restrict the decline. This was the second consecutive quarter of a YoY decrease in global shipments, which were hit by the seasonally weak demand for products from major players like Apple and Samsung, along with consumer sentiment dampened by global financial pressures.
We began to detect market movements for weakening smartwatch demand outside of India from Q2 2022. We think this is a temporary situation due to weakening consumer sentiment caused by global macro headwinds and higher exchange rate, and OEM clearing its inventories in the market. Now the trend has begun to emerge in earnest from the late 2022, and is expected to affect the market as a whole at least by the first half of 2023. Nevertheless, the continued strong growth of the Indian market is expected to eventually lead to 6.7% global market growth in 2023.
By region, NAM is expected to perform weakly in 2023 with Apple's sluggish performance, while China is expected to manage flat growth due to active volume push by OEMs such as Imoo and Oppo supported by re-opening in China. Despite some inventory accumulation in the market, Indian OEMs are still aggressive in smartwatch shipments, which is expected to continue the high annual growth of the Indian market in 2023. The European market, which was affected by the Ukraine war, will still need more time to turn to growth, and demand from Latin America and MEA is expected to start rebounding slowly from 2023.
This Excel report provides the smartwatch shipment forecast by key brand and region until 2026.
Published Date: May 2023
