Wearables’ 2019 market: Apple wins first place, followed by Xiaomi and then Samsung

Research and analysis company IDC has published a paper, analysing the market share and global sales for 2019 and announcing the top five wearables vendors. According to their research, Apple won the gold medal, thanks to the growing popularity of Apple Watches, AirPods and Beats headphones, Xiaomi took second place, and Samsung took third.

Overall, their research reports a total of 336.5 million wearable devices that were sold in 2019, up 89.0% from the 178.0 million units shipped in 2018. Wireless earphones took almost half of the market, followed by smartwatches and wrist bands.

Apple’s wearables took first place with the staggering percentage of sales growth compared to 2018 of 195.5%, Samsung, in third place, also showed astonishing growth of 156.4% for a year. Second place winner Xiaomi, even though it did not mark such an enormous growth percentage, was able to expand its reach to Europe, the Middle East and Africa regions.

Despite political struggles with the American government, Huawei, surprisingly, took fourth place in wearable sales, thanks to a strong performance on the Chinese market. The company even scored 188% growth compared to last year, making it one of the fastest growing companies in China.

Fitbit closed the top five vendors of wearables’ list for 2019, however, according to the report, the future of the company is uncertain due to its acquisition by Google in the fall of last year.

Across all vendors, it seems that people are most interested in buying wireless headphones - their sales grew from 27.4% in 2018’s last quarter to 48.1% in the last quarter of 2019.