Google to Be Smart Speaker Market Share Leader in 2022, HomePod to Pass 20 Million Units

Loup Ventures has a new forecast for Apple HomePod sales and it includes estimated smart speaker market share for Google and Amazon in both 2018 and 2022. Analysts forecast HomePod will command 12% market share in both 2018 and in 2022. Other smart speaker manufacturers will only capture 4% share in 2018 and that will decline to 3% during the period. The big shift involves Google and Amazon.

It will come as no surprise that Loup analysts predict the Amazon Echo product line will maintain a market share lead in 2018 with 52% to 38% for Google. However, you might be surprised at the market share erosion for Amazon of about 17 points with Google adding 14 points of share. That suggests Apple HomePod will predominantly steal market share from Amazon and other manufacturers as will Google. Even more interesting, Loup predicts that Google will seize the global smart speaker market share lead in 2022 with 48% to Amazon’s 37%.

These market share estimates reflect unit sales in that year. Due to Amazon’s current lead in installed base, even if this forecast is true Echo devices may still be at parity with or slightly ahead of Google Home in terms of total users and devices in use.

HomePod Sales to Exceed 20 Million Units Sold in 2021

The other interesting finding is that HomePod sales in 2018 are expected to be 7 million, grow to 10.9 million next year, 15.3 million in 2020 and surpass 20 million in 2021.

This is considerably higher than the 3.8 million units that Strategy Analytics analysts believe Apple will ship in 2018. However, the market share estimates aren’t much different. Strategy Analytics expects about 9% HomePod global smart speaker market share compared to 12% for Loup Ventures. Loup has a much larger estimated smart speaker market size for 2018 at about 58 million units sold compared to 45 million for Strategy Analytics. Some of this difference can be accounted for by Strategy Analytics only tracking five large countries and Loup’s attempt to quantify shipments to other countries as well. What is unknown is whether Apple will ship HomePod to countries other than the announced markets of the U.S., U.K., Australia, Germany and France.

Loup Ventures analysts also expect HomePod prices to drop precipitously. The prediction is that HomePod price falls to $299 for the 2018 holiday shopping season and then declines further to $199 in 2020 and reaches $149 in 2022. If you wait, Siri is likely to be better and you can expect to save on your purchase price.

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