Apple Already Owns 75% of World’s Smartwatch Market: Report

July 23, 2015

This week Apple posted quarterly earnings. It earned nearly $50 billion in revenue, pocketing nearly $11 million of that as profit.

Apple’s remarkable revenue came from the sales of 47 million iPhones, 11 million iPads, and nearly five million Macs. Plus how many Apple Watches? Well, we don’t know exactly, because CEO Tim Cook is standing by his vow not to say. Cook rolled Apple’s smartwatch sales into its “other” category, which includes stuff like iPods and standalone displays.

“We had an amazing quarter, with iPhone revenue up 59 percent over last year, strong sales of Mac, all-time record revenue from services, driven by the App Store, and a great start for Apple Watch,” said Cook. He’d later add, in response to an onslaught of media questions, that watch sales “exceeded expectations,” adding vaguely that early sales were “trending” better than the launches of the iPhone and iPad.

Based on what Cook said, as well as the equally ambiguous words of Apple CFO Luca Maestri during the company’s conference call, we can safely say that the Apple Watch generated well over $1 billion in revenue for the company. Strategy Analytics estimates Apple sold four million watches.

But perhaps the important number isn’t how many watches Apple sold, but how many more it sold than anyone else. Strategy Analytics suggests that Apple already owns 75% of the global smartwatch market—and, in doing so, effectively quadrupled the size of an entire tech product category in just three months.

Global smartwatch shipments grew 457 percent annually to hit a record five million units in the second quarter of 2015, Strategy Analytics says, with Apple responsible for the vast majority of that growth.

“Apple Watch has clearly raised the bar for the global smartwatch industry,” Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, said. “The ball is now in the court of rivals, like Samsung, to respond.”

Samsung, who started making smartwatches long before Apple, shipped less than half a million during the same period of time, capturing less than 10% of the market. Pretty distant for second place, but not unlike marketshare figures in the tablet category, where Apple has historically dominated.

“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,” Rajeev Nair, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, noted.