Report: Apple ships 800,000 cellular-enabled Apple Watch units in Q3

by Alan Friedman

Nov 14, 2017, 10:32 PM

Report: Apple ships 800,000 cellular-enabled Apple Watch units in Q3

The latest data about the wearable band market has been released by analytical firm Canalys, covering the third quarter of this year. For Apple, it was its strongest quarter of 2017 with 3.9 million Apple Watch units shipped in the period. Canalys estimates that despite a limited supply of the cellular enabled Apple Watch Series 3, Apple delivered 800,000 LTE supported smartwatches during the period. Overall, Apple had 23% of the wearable band market during the third quarter.

Right behind Apple was Xiaomi, which shipped 3.6 million units of its inexpensive Mi Band 2 for a 21% slice of the pie.With 20% of the market, Fitbit was third, having shipped 3.5 million wearable devices from July through September. Apple, Xiaomi and Fitbit also bucked historical trends by reporting sequential growth for the third quarter. Rounding out the top five was Huawei with a share of 6%, and Samsung with 5% of the market.

"Strong demand for the LTE-enabled Apple Watch Series 3 has dispelled service providers’ doubts about the cellular smartwatch not appealing to customers. In China, customers with high expectations are being driven away by the service disruption fiasco in the country. Besides bringing in more stock, operators should work on improving their remote service provisioning systems to cater for the expected higher demand in Q4"-Jason Low, analyst, Canalys

Overall, 17.3 million units were shipped during the third quarter, down 2%. Smartphone shipments were strong while basic bands fared poorly.