Brendan James: takeaways from the east, September 2018

Smartphone volumes may be on the decline, but their smart portable counterparts are getting shipped with increasing frequency.

As vast as the world is, there’s a finite limit on the consumer market’s thirst for smartphones. Generally, people don’t need to update every year, regardless of how stunning the displays and how power-packed the performance is. But all hope is not lost: smartphones are the control center of the burgeoning smart-home technology wave, and as consumers move to deck their homes out in the latest wireless accessories, that’s where the money’s going. This month’s Takeaways From The East, where the popularity of smart-home devices and accessories tell us where manufacturers could soon begin to focus their attention more sharply in the wake of the levelling-off of smartphone shipments.

Of all the smart-home accessories, let’s focus on two. First, Canalys reports that the smart speaker trend is happening worldwide; in Q2 2018, the shipments of these devices grew by 187%. Google takes the top spot with 32.3% of the global market share, up from 16.9% in Q2 2017, and Amazon’s popular Alexa speaker has garnered them the #2 position at 24.5%. The newcomers to the game round out the top 4, as Chinese powerhouses Alibaba takes 17.7% of the cake and Xiaomi nabs 12.2%.

Alibaba’s presence is especially felt in its home country, where it has 50% of the marker having shipped three million units. Hattie He says that the Chinese firms have relied on aggressive price cuts to fuel their rise in this sector, and could even overtake the US in this firm soon.