NPD DisplaySearch has a thoughtful analysis of the wearables market over the next five or six years, predicting a slump next year — the depth and length of which they acknowledge is unpredictable.
What’s interesting about the Wearable Device Market and Forecast Report is that it offers three different scenarios for market growth. The most pessimistic postulates that wearables are a fad that will dissatisfy users and that people will soon have their fill. Under that scenario, sales drop precipitously in 2016 and 2017, and recover only modestly.
The most optimistic forecast presumes that someone will come up with a compelling use case for wearables and locks users into a friendly ecosystem. This forecast suggests that wearables will be established in areas like security and healthcare, not just as individual standalone or tethered devices. Interestingly, this projection estimates slower growth than the other scenarios over the next two years, with sales taking off in 2016 and 2017.
The abstract alone makes good reading, and we bet the full report (which is probably expensive) is even more so.