Global sales of wearables expected to spike

smartwatch wearables technology

Gartner sees sales of smartwatches and fitness bands heading in a skyward direction over the next few years.

Gartner has now released its latest forecasts about the sale of wearables over the next few years, and it has predicted that these devices will see a global increase of 18.4 percent, which will bring the figure up from 232.0 million units sold, last year, to a notably higher 274.6 million units sold by the end of 2016.

This year, wearable technology devices will have generated a total of $28.7 billion in global revenues.

Of that wearable technology revenue total, Gartner predicts that $11.5 billion will have been generated from the sale of smartwatches. According Gartner research director, Angela McIntyre, “From 2015 through 2017, smartwatch adoption will have 48 percent growth largely due to Apple popularizing wearables as a lifestyle trend. Smartwatches have the greatest revenue potential among all wearables through 2019, reaching $17.5 billion.” McIntyre went on to say that while smartwatch sales are quite strong, it is important to note that their rate of adoption will stay pointedly lower than the figures for smartphone sales.

While smartphone sales have skyrocketed to a point of near penetration in many areas, wearables won’t see this same popularity.

smartwatch wearables technologyThis will be the case at least for another couple of years, according to the figures released in the Gartner forecast report. McIntyre explained that Gartner predicts that there will be over 374 million smartphone sales in mature market countries as well as in the larger urban areas of countries in developing markets, such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

The Gartner report showed that the largest number of sales will be seen within the fitness tracker category. That includes a range of different devices such as wristbands, chest straps, sports watches, smart clothing and other types of wearable technology fitness monitors.

McIntyre stated that among all the types of wearables in the fitness category, it will be the sports watches that will be most likely to keep up the current retail price over the next handful of years. She also added that as advancements in sensor and analytics technologies continue in sports watches, it will bring on new spectrums of features that will boost the average retail sales prices.

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