Boston – Apple wouldn’t disclose sales of its Apple Watch, but research company Strategy Analytics is happy to disclose its estimate that Apple shipped 4 million units in the second quarter to capture 75 percent of global smart watch shipments.
Industrywide global sales rose to 5 million in the quarter from a mere 1 million in the year-ago quarter, Strategy Analytics said.
In the year-ago quarter, Samsung held 73.6 percent share, but that dropped to 7.5 percent in the second quarter of this year following the April launch of the Apple Watch. All other brands captured a collective 17 percent share.
The industry’s second-quarter growth rate of 457 percent was the industry’s fastest growth rate ever, said director Cliff Raskind. “Volumes in the second quarter of 2015 were higher than for the whole of last year, when 4.6 million smartwatches shipped globally in 2014.”
Apple Watch launched in 16 major countries “and saw decent take-up from iPhone loyalists in the United States and elsewhere,” said executive director Neil Mawston.
Added senior analyst Rajeev Nair, “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.”
