There’s no disputing Amazon’s first-mover advantage in the smartspeaker category. Thanks to their Echo release in November of 2014, Amazon was able to get in front of the latest tech wave in a way only Apple used to do. With that lead came the ability to run the playing field for a few years. As a result they enjoyed a period of selling the vast majority of all smartspeakers worldwide – just a year ago in Q1’17 Amazon sold an amazing 82% of all units shipped!
But now the smartspeaker market is starting to mature, with more units being sold and more competitors taking a slice out of the pie. For Amazon’s part they shipped 4M Echo and Dot units in Q1’18 compared to 2M in Q1’17. Most companies would kill for a 100% YoY increase, right? However their share of units sold was cut in half to 43%. Here’s a snapshot of worldwide smartspeaker sales from Q1 along with each competitors’ YoY growth.
Bottom line – Amazon is selling more units than ever, but their share of an expanding pie is significantly shrinking. I’d expect this trend to continue for the next several quarters.