This shows that the South Korean brand is taking some very meaningful strides in this gadget category.
Samsung wearable devices have hit a major landmark as they have now overtaken their rival, Fitbit, for the first time.
For years, Fitbit has been the measure against which other top wearables companies have measured themselves.
Now, a Strategy Analytics research report shows that Samsung wearable devices account for more of the market than Fitbit. During the first quarter of 2017, The Samsung Gear S3 held 12.8 percent of the global market, which was a tiny, but meaningful sliver ahead of Fitbit’s 12.2 percent of the worldwide marketplace. That said, both brands remained well behind the Apple Watch, which has grabbed hold of over half the market during that time, at 53 percent.
The report linked the Samsung wearable devices growth to strong Gear S3 smartwatch sales.
The Gear S3 smartwatch first launched back in November 2016 and was nearly immediately popular among consumers. One of the main reasons it gained such rapid popularity was that it features an impressively long battery life and additional functionalities. Among those added functions is compatibility with the Samsung Pay mobile wallet service.
Equally, Samsung had an advantage in passing Fitbit in the wearable technology marketplace as the fitness tracker’s own sales are sliding. It is currently facing an uphill battle in launching new products that will encourage its users to dump their old trackers in order to replace them with new ones. This problem for the company has only worsened as a growing number of reports make headlines, demonstrating how fitness trackers – including those from Fitbit – are not as accurate as they would lead consumers to believe.
Earlier in June, International Data Corp (IDC) released a similar report on the first quarter 2017 wearable technology market. In it, the firm gave Fitbit third place. This was the first time in several quarters that Fitbit has held anything but the top position. That said, in the IDC report, it wasn’t the Samsung wearable devices that were given the second spot, it was Xiaomi. That report indicated that Apple and the Chinese gadget maker both shipped more wearables than Fitbit but that Fitbit shipped more than Samsung.
