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Wearables delivered double-digit factor offers consumers more features and
growth for Q421 and full year customization.
NEEDHAM, Mass. — The worldwide Lesser-known categories such as glasses
wearables market hit a new record (those without displays), rings, connect-
high in the fourth quarter of 2021 ed shoes, and others managed to grow
(4Q21) as shipments reached 171 mil- 94.1% during the quarter largely due to
lion units, up 10.8% from the same products like the Oura Ring and Facebook/
quarter last year, according to new Ray-Ban Stories.
data from the International Data Cor-
poration (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Supply issues are subsiding
Wearable Device Tracker. “While supply has been a constant battle
for many companies during 2021, many
Health and fitness of the issues began to subside during the
New products and continued demand for quarter and allowed brands to ship record
health and fitness tracking products along volumes while broadening their product
with hearables helped the market main- lines,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manag-
tain its momentum. Shipments for the full er for IDC Mobility and Consumer Device
year 2021 totaled 533.6 million units, an Trackers.
increase of 20.0% over 2020.
“However, the supply crunch also forced
Hearables were once again the leading many companies to think about services
category as shipment volume grew 9.6% and this is likely going to play a key role
during the quarter and accounted for al- in the wearbles market moving forward as
most two-thirds of the entire wearables OEMs can experiment with their business
market. models by subsidzing the hardware pur-
chase though on-going services revenue.”
Meanwhile, watches continued to steal
share from wristbands as the larger form Apple remained out-front
“Although Apple remained far out-front for
the year, another telling sign of the market
is the long list of vendors com-
ing afterwards,” notes Ramon
T. Llamas, research director.
“Samsung, Huawei, and Imag-
ine Marketing all posted mar-
ket-beating year-over-year
growth, as did our collective
‘Others’ group.
“That shows demand is
spreading out to other compa-
nies and products, all of which
bring added diversity and price
competition to attract and re-
tain more customers.”
idc.com
