Smart Speaker Sales In 2019 Grew By 70% And Won't Likely Be Affected By The Coronavirus Outbreak

According to the latest Strategy Analytics’ report on the smart speaker market, smart speaker sales all over the world in 2019 grew strongly, hit a record number of 146.9 million units, increased by 70% compared with 2018.

Amazon is still the leader and popular in the US market but in the global market, competitors from China are growing fast. Despite the company's Echo maintaining the leading position in the smart speaker sector, Amazon’s market share dropped from 33.7% in 2018 to 26.2% in 2019. But that doesn’t mean Google gained more. Google’s share in 2018 was 25.9%, but it was only 20.3% in 2019.

The figures show that Google and Amazon are still the biggest players in Europe and North America, where they make up more than 75% of all sales. While Apple was still at the 6th place in the rankings with only 4.7% of market share, respective shares of vendors from China like Baidu, Xiaomi, and Alibaba all increased.

It was better if we only look at the figure for quarter 4. In the holiday shopping season, every vendor has a big sale off to promote sales. In the last 3 months of 2019, Amazon took the first position with 15.8 million units sold, in second place was Google with 13.9 million followed by Baidu with 5.9 million.

All in all, smart speaker sales in quarter 4 of Google hit a record number of 55.7 million units in total. According to Strategy Analytics, the improvement of the business attributed to new product introduction, component supply improvement, as well as strong promotion activities.

David Watkins, director at Strategy Analytics, said that the interest of consumers for smart speakers is still high during the fourth quarter due to new devices with improved features and quality. He also said that consumers were attracted by deals from big vendors like Amazon, Google or Alibaba, but Google has also pushed the partnership with other brands such as Spotify or Youtube.

Strategy Analytics believes that the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak won’t cause many difficulties for the smart speaker market and we can expect another record in 2020.

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