Page 31 - The EDIT | Q3 2017

When you walk around the streets in Singapore or travel around in Asia, it certainly seems like everyone here in Asia has a wearable. If that is Hong Kong’s Kowloon Park to the East Coast Park in Singapore and People’s Park in Shanghai, Asian cities seem to be full of joggers and runners wearing some sort of fitness tracker.
According to Gerard Tan from GfK Asia, Asia Pacific is the single largest market for wearables in the world with China, Japan, Korea and Australia being the big players in a market that has not reached its peak yet. Wearables in Asia grew by 51% last year, with 42 million smartwatches, fitness trackers and other devices sold. This number is quite impressive when we consider that the worldwide estimate is around 102 million. Despite that rate decreasing slightly to this year to 38%, Asia will still be where most wearables are sold.
So why is Asia so hot for wearables? Tan thinks it’s because people in Asia adapt more quickly to the latest tech trends and innovations. Others even reckon it has something do with the region’s strong interest in video games.
Discovery
The ‘wearable device’ we know now will evolve
Marketer predicts that the number of wearables devices shipped will more than double in the next five years. In 2017, watches make up the lion share of wearables (57%) and data suggests that the share of watches within the wearable tech market will raise up to even 67% by 2021.
While there is growth in the space of wearables, this data might be too one-sided as the numbers for both earwear and other are relatively low — even for 2017.
With improvements in the field of NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and the increasing power of computing (and hence smaller devices), hearables are expected to be a main element of the wearable market in the future.

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Wearable Device Shipments Worldwide, by Type, 2017 & 2021
millions, % of total
Note: numbers may not add up to total due to rounding
Source: International Data Corporation (IDC), “Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker” as cited in press release, June 21, 2017
www.eMarketer.com
“Fitness trackers thrive on the willingness of people to engage in the gami cation of the quanti ed self.”
[Ian Hughes, analyst for Internet of Things at 451 Research]
THE EDIT ISSUE 7 | Q3 2017