NEW DELHI: Indians seem to be buying more and more smart watches and wireless earbuds. According to the latest IDC report, the India wearable market posted a remarkable 144.3% year-over-year (YoY) growth in 2020.
The report adds that India was the only country in the list of top 20 which witnessed triple-digit growth in the wearables segment in 2020.
The report also revealed that this growth was majorly driven by increase in the acceptance of earwear devices and upgrades to watches from wrist bands.

4Q20 (Oct-Dec 2020) recorded the biggest quarter for wearables in India, maintaining triple-digit growth. Overall, vendors shipped 15.2 million units in 4Q20, growing 198.2% YoY
Earwear device shipments grew more than threefold in 2020 compared to the previous year, mainly driven by the affordable launches, and expanding use cases beyond entertainment like virtual meetings and e-learning requirements.
Truly Wireless Stereo (TWS) devices were the top gainer seeing a tenfold increase with shipments totaling 11.3 million units in 2020.
The Earwear category accounted for 83.6% of the overall wearable market share to hit 30.4 million unit shipments in 2020. BoAt emerged as the biggest player in the category, accounting for one-third of the category shipments.

Samsung and Realme captured the second and third spot with 14.5% and 13.5% market share respectively.
Watches grew significantly as demand for wrist bands declined during the year. Watches saw a 139.3% YoY growth with 2.6-million- unit shipments in 2020. Noise led the watch category with a 24.5% share in 2020 followed by Realme with a 15.7% share in the year.

Smartwatches, which can run third-party applications on the device itself, accounted for a 24.5% share in the watch category, and Apple continues to lead the smartwatch category with a 51.0% share in 2020.
Wristbands declined by 34.3% YoY in 2020 since peaking in 2019 as the year ended with 3.3-million-unit shipments. After the introduction of wrist bands into the Indian market, 2020 has been the first year when the category reported a decline.

The increasing popularity of watches at similar price points to that of wristbands is the main factor of the decline of wristbands. With 46.7% of the share, Xiaomi continued to lead the category in 2020. Realme, which entered the segment in 2020 finished second with a 12.3% category share.