Apple’s HomePod mini shipments doubled in 2021

Price may turn out to have been the sweet spot to push Apple’s HomePod tech into more homes, according to the latest Strategy Analytics data.

HomePod mini gets respectable

HomePod mini generated c.4 million sales giving Apple around 10.2 percent of global market share in Q3 2021, the analysts claim. That’s up from 5.9% and 2.1 million shipments in the year before quarter, their data shows.

Overall, Strategy Analytics estimates total smart speaker and smart display shipments grew 10% year-over-year to 39.3 million units, a record for a third calendar quarter. They do note that sales in Q4 have been hit by intensification in the COVID crisis and warn that some smaller smart speaker vendors may yet be hit by the component supply crisis.

Sales of Smart Displays in Q3 surged year-on-year by almost 19% to 11.2 million units, they said.

But consumers have other things to consider

Jack Narcotta, Principal Industry Analyst, Smart Home, added, “While the first half of 2021 in the global smart speaker and smart display market was a return to form as vendors capitalized on pent-up demand from 2020, the lingering, if not intensifying, issues of shipping and logistics challenges, component shortages, and the Delta and Omicron variants of the COVID-19 virus in the second half of 2021 are hanging heavy on this market. It is likely this market’s growth will not return to pre-COVID levels until at least 2023.”

David Watkins, Director, Intelligent Home. “China alone typically accounts for 30% to 40% of the global market each quarter, so challenges experienced by Alibaba, Baidu, and Xiaomi will be indicators for how well – or not – China is managing its supply chain issues. The contract manufacturers partnered with these three, and dozens of other smart speaker and smart display brands, are settling in for a prolonged period of supply chain issues.”

What’s at stake?

Introduced just over a year ago in 2020, HomePod mini is much smaller than the device it has replaced and costs a lot less too, now $99. Apple this year introduced new colors for the device along with a relatively low cost Apple Music streaming system, Apple Music Voice. The latter is completely controlled by Siri but offers a range of useful commands.

When it comes to music streaming, Apple remains locked into battle against Amazon, Spotify and others.

A recent Morgan Stanley report confirms Apple has some need to intensify its offer against competitors, saying Spotify now holds the largest reported listening share among 18-29 year olds at 21%. That’s over twice as big as Apple Music’s reported share.

In the side corner Apple may plan to offload some older tech in the form of iPad-like smart displays offering a limited range of functions, likely including phone calls, recent reports have claimed.

Doing so would put it up against the company formerly known as Facebook, and others (including Zoom) seeking to leverage their technologies to take a bigger space in the home hardware market.

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