Amazon remains in control of the global smart speaker market, but watch out for Google
According to the latest data from Strategy Analytics, 9.2 million smart speakers were in the first quarter of this year. Category creator Amazon is still riding the wave of being first to market as it delivered 4 million units from January through March. That doubled the 2 million devices it shipped during last year's first quarter. Despite that growth, other manufacturers did even better and Amazon's market share declined from the 81.8% it had during Q1 of 2017 to the 43.6% it had during this year's first three months.
One of those smart speaker manufacturers that achieved stronger growth than Amazon in the period was Google. The company had an amazing 709% year-over-year improvement in first quarter shipments to 2.4 million units from the 300,000 it delivered during 2017's first three months. Chinese emall giant Alibaba (7.6% market share) shipped 700,000 branded smart speakers, Apple (6%) had 600,000 HomePods in transit, and Xiaomi (2.4%) delivered 200,000 units during the first quarter of 2018. All three did not have a smart speaker to ship the previous year.
The remaining smart speaker manufacturers transported 1.3 million smart speakers from January through March this year, an 809% year-over-year improvement. Those other brands captured 13.8% of the market during Q1, up from last year's 5.8%.
Overall, 9.2 million total smart speakers shipped from January through March. That was a 278% hike from the 2.4 million units transported during the same three months last year.
source: StrategyAnalytics
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