Author: Kyle Wiggers / Source: VentureBeat
Market momentum for smart speakers shows no sign of slowing — quite the opposite, in fact. A new report published by research firm Canalys indicates that worldwide smart speaker shipments grew 137 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2018 to reach 19.
7 million units, up from 8.3 million in Q3 2017.Amazon won the quarter by sales — it managed to get 6.3 million Echo smart speakers onto eager customers’ doorsteps by Q3’s end. But Google rode close on its coattails with 5.9 million Google Home devices shipped.
The quarter marked something of a turnaround for Amazon, which ceded ground to Google in Q2 2018. Strategy Analytics reported in September that the Google Home Mini was the best-selling voice-enabled speaker in the second quarter of 2018, followed by Amazon’s Echo Dot. And in August, Canalys predicted that if Amazon were to remain on its current trajectory, it would see its share of the smart speaker market slip to 34 percent by 2022.
Q3 2018 sales contributed to 30 percent uplift in the domestic smart speaker market, and significant growth in China and the U.K. The U.S. and China — the latter of which saw speaker shipments increase to 5.8 million in Q3 2018 — together took 70 percent of the global market by…
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