Apple is dominating the smart watch market as consumers are warming up to apps on their wrists: The company sold more than 5.1 million Apple Watches worldwide during the 2015 holiday quarter, according to new estimates from Strategy Analytics.
This would give Apple a 63 percent share of the smart watch market, with the report estimating total worldwide smart watch sales for the quarter to be 8.1 million. Runner-up is Samsung with 16 percent, or 1.3 million units sold.
Overall, the market has grown significantly since the 2014 holiday quarter, when consumers snapped up an estimated 1.9 million smart watches. Apple introduced the Apple Watch in the fall of 2014, but didn’t actually start to ship the device until April of 2015.
The growth of the segment isn’t just impressive, it’s actually replacing some traditional watch sales. Swiss watches slightly declined from 8.3 million to 7.9 million over the same time period, which means that smart watches now sell better than Swiss timepieces.
It’s worth pointing out that all of this is based on analysts’ estimates. Apple hasn’t released any sales figures for the Apple Watch, and has instead lumped up the device in a revenue category that also includes Apple TVs, Beats headphones and iPods.
