Smartwatches overtake Swiss watches in Q4 2015

So it begins: “worldwide smartwatch shipments” have hit 8.1 million units in Q4 2015 compared to 7.9 million for Swiss watch shipments. However, recent independent figures seem to suggest that it’s doing pretty well. Smartwatch producers shipped out more of their devices than top-notch timepieces at the end of previous year, according to new research. This means that Apple definitely had an impact in the smartwatch market, as their smartwatch was released in April 2015. Being an accessory for the iPhone, it did not catch enough sales as its complementary half, but it did lead the category to outshine traditional Swiss watches. The rest of the market was carved up between Android Wear watches (with 15 percent of the market, per IDC), Pebble watches (with 8.6 percent), Samsung’s Tizen-based Gear watches (with 8.2 percent), and a mish-mash of smaller players. The report claimed that in Q4, 8.1 million smartwatches were shipped versus the 7.9 million Swiss watches that were shipped.

While smartwatches have seen growth of over 300 percent in the last 12 months, the Swiss watch industry has seen shipments fall by 5 percent, from 8.3 million units in the final three months of 2014.

“Smart watches are growing rapidly in North America, Western Europe and Asia”, Cliff Raskind, a director at the Boston company, said in a statement.

Executive director Neil Mawston added that the industry has been “sticking its head in the sand and hoping smartwatches will go away”, with Swiss brands like Tag Heuer only accounting for a “tiny 1 percent” of all smartwatches shipped during the quarter. It’s also unclear if high-end smartwatches like the $10,000-and-up Apple Watch Edition can truly compete with the luxury Swiss watch business.

“The Swiss watch industry has been very slow to react to the development of smartwatches”.