The analyst company Canalys has shared its latest data about the smart personal audio market for Q2 2024. Interestingly, it highlighted that brands such as Huawei and JBL have been getting very creative in response to competition and the sector experiencing a price war.
Cynthia Chen, a research manager at Canalys, said that vendors are looking to add novelty features to stand out from the crowd. She highlighted that Huawei has been targeting women with the Huawei Lipstick 2, which stylizes the case like lipstick, and that JBL has added a display to its cases so you can see your notifications there instead of checking your phone.
Other market participants are integrating the hot tech of the day - AI - into their products. Companies doing this include Nothing and iFlytek. Chen said that it's still too early to see how AI integration will work, but it's an interesting development nonetheless.
During the second quarter, the smart personal audio market, including TWS, wireless earphones, and wireless headphones, rebounded strongly. Total shipments reached 106 million units, up 10.6% year-on-year. Significantly, this is the highest number of second-quarter shipments in the segment's history. Canalys said TWS and wireless headphones were growth drivers, reaching 77 million and 15 million units, respectively.
Canalys said that the TWS segment has slowed down, but vendors have managed to fight this by offering pricing models under $50. For the first time, products in this price range made up more than 50% of the market.
The most successful vendor during the quarter was Apple which held 17.1% of the market share, however, this was down from 19.4% year-on-year. Xiaomi saw the most growth, with market share growing 40.4% from 3.9% to 4.9%. The top five vendors in order were Apple, Samsung, Boat, Xiaomi, and Sony.
With these Bluetooth wireless audio products becoming more affordable, consumers should also be less concerned about the lack of an audio jack on smartphones.
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