CCS Insight is out with a new report that says the wearables market in 2018 will be 135 million units, up from 9.7 million units last year. The industry, they say, will be dominated by wristware: 87 percent of the devices shipped that year will be worn on the wrist. Or so they say.
Marina Koytcheva, CCS Insight’s director of forecasting, more or less throws up her hands in predicting this market, though, describing it as “chaotic”:
“… [t]here’s still a huge amount of uncertainty. Every category faces different risks: the way people use wearables is still changing, one type of device could kill sales in another category, people are unsure whether some wearables are socially acceptable, and intellectual property rights are a minefield for the dozens of start-ups entering the wearables market.”
And that’s without taking Apple into account. (How can you do a market forecast in August 2014 without making a guess about Apple, when everyone and his brother are expecting an Apple device next month?)
But if you believe the numbers, they produced a pretty infographic. There’s a PDF of it here.
