Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On Sept. 6, Huawei released its latest smartphone, the Mate 50 series, which competes head-on with Apple's iPhone 14 released on Sept. 7. Young people may like to watch such a lively new smartphone scuffle, but they don't really buy it.

According to IDC, global smartphone shipments fell 9% in the second quarter of 2022 compared with the same period last year, of which about 67.2 million units were shipped in the Chinese smartphone market, down 14.7% from the same period last year.

Fewer and fewer people change their phones, leading to a continued decline in the smartphone market. On the other hand, the market for smartwatches is expanding. Global smartwatch shipments rose 13 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2022, while smartwatch sales in China rose 48 per cent year-on-year, according to Counterpoint.

We wonder why smartwatches have become the new darling of the digital market when mobile phone sales continue to decline.

What is a smartwatch? it is only in recent years that smartwatch has been popular.

Many people may be more familiar with its predecessor, the smart bracelet. In fact, both of them are a kind of "smart wear" products. Baidu encyclopedia defines "smart wear" as "the general name of using wearable technology to intelligently design everyday wear and develop wearable (electronic) devices."

At present, the most common forms of smart wear include earwear (including all kinds of headphones), wrist wear (including bracelets, watches, etc.) and headwear (VR / AR devices).

As the most advanced wristband smart wearable devices on the market, smartwatches can be divided into three categories according to their service: children's smartwatches focus on accurate positioning, security, learning assistance and other functions, while smartwatches for the elderly focus more on health monitoring, while adult smartwatches can assist fitness, office, and online payment. The function is more comprehensive.

According to function, smartwatch can also be divided into professional health, sports watch, and more versatile all-round smartwatch. But these are subcategories that have only emerged in recent years. At first, smartwatches were just "electronic watches" or "digital watches" that used computing technology.

This history dates back to 1972, when Japanese Seiko and the American Hamilton Watch Company developed wrist computing technology and released the first digital watch, the Pulsar, which sold for $2100 at the time. Since then, digital watches have continuously improved and evolved into smartwatches, and finally successfully entered the general consumer market before 2015 with the entry of mainstream brands such as Apple, Huawei and BBK.

Until today, new brands continue to join the competition in the smartwatch market. Because compared with the already saturated smartphone market, the smart wear market still has great potential. Smartwatch-related technology, also in a decade, has undergone great changes.

Take Apple's Apple Watch as an example:

In 2015, the first series 0, which can measure heart rate and connect Wi-Fi, is more functionally attached to the phone. In the following years, independent GPS, swimming waterproofing, breathing training, electrocardiogram, blood oxygen measurement, sleep recording, temperature sensing and other exercise and health monitoring functions were added, and gradually independent of mobile phones.

And in recent years, with the introduction of functions such as SOS emergency call for help and car accident detection, security functions will probably become a major trend of iterative update of smartwatches in the future.

Interestingly, when the first generation of Apple watch came out, Apple launched an Apple Watch Edition that sold for more than $12000 and wanted to turn it into a luxury similar to traditional watches. However, technology products are updated too fast to maintain their value like ordinary luxury goods, and few people are willing to buy them. The Edition series was also cancelled the following year.

What kind of smartwatch is everyone buying? In terms of sales alone, Apple and Huawei are the fault Top of the domestic adult smartwatch market. Their sales on Tmall are more than 10 times that of Xiaomi and OPPO, which rank third and fourth. Sales have been affected to some extent by the lack of recognition of Xiaomi and OPPO due to their late entry (the first smartwatch was launched in 2019 and 2020, respectively).

Xiaomi is actually one of the pioneer brands in the wearable field, releasing its first Xiaomi bracelet as early as 2014. According to IDC, Xiaomi accumulated 100 million shipments of wearables in 2019, thanks to wearable devices on the wrist, or Xiaomi bracelets. But Xiaomi focused on bracelets and only invested in Huami Technology (now the maker of Amazfit) in 2014, and did not launch a smartwatch brand that belongs entirely to Xiaomi. It was not until the decline in smart bracelet sales in recent years that Xiaomi was forced to join the competition in the smartwatch market.

Although there are not as many choices in the smartwatch market as mobile phones, the differentiation competition between different brands is still in full swing.

At present, the top five smartwatch brands have different product lines to meet the needs of different people. Take Apple as an example, the new Apple Watch released in September this year has three series: SE (cost-effective), S8 (standard all-around) and Ultra (outdoor specialty).

But the competitive advantage of each brand is different. This year, for example, Apple tried to break into the field of outdoor professional watches with Ultra, but it was not favored by many people. Because Garmin, a brand that started with GPS, has a natural advantage in this region:

Jiaming's smartwatch has professional field sports functions such as solar charging, high precision positioning, high brightness LED lighting, thermal adaptation and high adaptation. By comparison, the Apple Watch, which still needs to be recharged once a day and a half after the upgrade (the Ultra battery lasts 36 hours), is too "chicken".

The Apple Watch's one-day battery life experience has been criticized for a long time. Domestic brands, whether Huawei, OPPO or Xiaomi, are much better than Apple at this point. Under normal use, the battery life of Huawei's GT3 is 14 days, Xiaomi's Watch S1 is 12 days, and OPPO Watch 3 can reach 10 days. Compared with Huawei, OPPO and Xiaomi are more friendly to the people in price.

Although the market size of children's watches is smaller than that of adult watches, it also occupies a considerable market share. According to IDC industry data, about 15.82 million smartwatches were shipped in China in 2020, accounting for 38.10% of the total market share of smartwatches.

At present, the small genius of the sub-brand of BBG has occupied the leading position in the industry because of its early entry, and its total sales on Tmall are more than double that of Huawei, which ranks second. According to forward-looking data, genius currently accounts for more than 30% of children's smartwatches, on a par with Apple's market share in adult smartwatches.

Why do people buy smartwatches? Sports records are the main reason for consumers to buy smartwatches, with 67.9% of respondents saying they have this demand. Sleep records, health monitoring and GPS positioning are also the reasons for more than half of consumers to buy smartwatches.

Zhang Tiantian (not his real name), who bought Apple Watch Series 7 six months ago, bought a smartwatch to monitor his health and promote better exercise. Six months later, she felt that her daily habits had indeed changed:

"I will do anything to close the (health index) circle. I will stand more and walk more in my daily life, and now I will get off one stop earlier when I get home on the subway, so I will walk 1.5 kilometers more than usual and consume about 80 more calories."

In fact, "health", "positioning" and "exercise" is indeed the most frequently used function for smartwatch users. 61.1% of the respondents said they often use the health monitoring function of the watch, while more than half of the respondents said they often use the function of GPS positioning and motion recording.

And for those functions that can be performed by smartphones themselves, such as "phone", "Wechat" and "information", relatively few respondents said they would often use smartwatches: only 32.1%, 25.6% and 10.10% respectively said they would use these functions regularly on smartwatches.

In the Little Red Book, in addition to brand recommendation and evaluation, functional use and appearance design are the most discussed aspects of smartwatch-related notes.

The discussion about the appearance of a smartwatch is no less than the pursuit of its function and use. After all, smart wearers are essentially meant to be "worn" on the body and become part of their personal image. Therefore, in the discussion about smartwatches, adjectives that are often used to describe clothing, such as "good-looking", "cute", "high-end" and "delicate", also appear frequently.

In terms of functional use, in addition to sports and health, "learning", "payment", "social" and "games" are also functions that people will pay attention to when choosing smartwatches.

Zhang Tiantian, a new smartwatch user, said that he will often use Apple Watch to "compete with others and add friends" to further motivate himself to keep exercising and keep healthy body data.

Xiao Mengxian (not his real name), who is planning to buy a smartwatch, considers that if the office is checked tightly and his mobile phone is too conspicuous, it will be convenient to fish with a watch.

In addition to these relatively practical functions, smartwatches have many bizarre, seemingly useless skills that are sought after by some young people.

For example, regular Apple Watch SE user Ke Renren (not her real name) recently discovered a third-party App called airshot, which can be automatically equipped with special sound effects when smartwatch wearers make air shots, hand shots, etc., and become her "social weapon" these days. As long as they meet friends, they will be happy to perform air shots with their own BGM.

On bilibili, some UP owners even played mobile games with smartwatches:

As brands continue to increase their dial area in recent years (Apple Watch has evolved from the original 38mm to the 49mm dial of this year's new series of Ultra, expanding by nearly 30 per cent), more functionality is also becoming possible.

After using the smartwatch for half a year in immersion and really feeling its benefits for health monitoring, Zhang Tiantian said a little helplessly:

"I feel like I've been kidnapped by a smartwatch."

Obviously decided to buy a smartwatch, obviously they want to achieve the goal through the smartwatch, but feel an inexplicable sense of "discipline" in the implementation, which is not uncommon among young smartwatch users.

Xiaoyu (not her real name) went to the cinema last weekend and saw the excitement when the smartwatch reminded her that it was time to "stand up and move". For a moment, she was "really thinking about going for a walk".

The little red book blogger @ complained that the smartwatch was a "record of taming humans": "after having a smartwatch, like the donkey of the production team, I can't stop."

Perhaps self-discipline has been a panoramic prison in Bentham from the beginning, while a smartwatch is a handcuff we wear voluntarily-for better service.

This article comes from Wechat official account: DT Finance (ID:DTcaijing), text: Cai Yiji Editor: Tang Yiqin Visualization: Zheng Shuya data: Dong Daoli Operation: Su Hongrui Supervisor producer: Tang Yiqin

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