Under the COVID-19, consumers are more interested in smart watches that provide more advanced health and fitness monitoring. Although smart bracelets are still attractive to price sensitive consumers, competition from the rapidly growing low-cost smart watches has intensified. In 2021, the growth rate of shipments of the global smart bracelet market will enter a negative growth, and it may continue to decline in 2022.
Under the COVID-19, consumers are more interested in smart watches that provide more advanced health and fitness monitoring. Although smart bracelets are still attractive to price sensitive consumers, competition from the rapidly growing low-cost smart watches has intensified. In 2021, the growth rate of shipments of the global smart bracelet market will enter a negative growth, and it may continue to decline in 2022.
According to a recent Counterpoint Research study, the growth of shipments in the global smart bracelet market will enter a negative growth region in 2021, and this trend is expected to continue in the future. Considering the huge growth potential of the entire wearable market, why is the prospect of only smart bracelets so bleak?
Compared with the smart watch, the smart bracelet has lower price and longer battery life, so it is the first to be popularized in the wrist wearable market. However, during COVID-19, consumers' interest in health care and fitness increased dramatically, and they began to turn their attention to smart watches that support more functions. Therefore, the shipment of smart bracelets will show a negative growth from 2021.
Source: Counterpoint Research IoT device tracker
Similarities and differences between smart bracelets and smart watches
Smart bracelets and smart watches are watch like computing devices worn on wrists. They perform the same function for the main purpose of health and fitness tracking. However, although the two devices differ in appearance, the greater difference lies in the operating system and its functions. The smart bracelet mainly runs on RTOS (real-time operating system), while the smart watch uses a higher level operating system and supports more advanced health monitoring functions, such as blood pressure and electrocardiogram. Higher level operating systems can also support third-party applications to enable more advanced health monitoring and management applications. In addition, users can download and use their favorite weather, music or game applications on their smart watches.
Similar user experience but different target price range
Another important difference is price. According to our latest estimate, 89% of the smart bracelets will cost less than $100 to ship in 2021. On the other hand, only 30% of smart watch shipments in 2021 will cost less than $100.
Source: Counterpoint Research IoT device tracker
Since the second half of 2021, the low-cost smart watch models launched by Indian OEM have seen explosive growth, attracting existing smart bracelet users. As a result, India's smart watch shipments have soared. In this context, the trend from smart bracelets to smart watches is expected to continue, and the smart bracelet market will continue to shrink. However, as the growth rate of the smart watch market tends to be stable, the year-on-year decline of smart bracelet shipments will gradually slow down.
Smart bracelet OEMs pay more and more attention to smart watches
As Xiaomi, Fitbit and other major smart bracelet brands begin to pay more attention to the release of smart watches than smart bracelets, the proportion of the top five major brands will gradually decrease, and the share of small and medium-sized brands will increase. However, due to the high brand loyalty and limited substitutes of Jiaming bracelet users with higher average selling prices, it may be difficult to avoid a decline in shipments while maintaining a stable market share.
In this changing market trend, it is obvious that consumers' interest in wrist wearables is increasing. In order to make up for the weak functions compared with smart watches, a smart bracelet equipped with more advanced health monitoring functions, such as blood oxygen saturation and temperature measurement, has recently been released. Therefore, we believe that the future of the wrist wearable market is bright as consumers have more choices within the price range.
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