Amazon Echo Beats Google Home in Smart Speaker Sales in India

Amazon has made its presence felt in the smart home category with Echo speakers and Fire Stick.

Echo Dot 2017 (left) and the Echo Dot 2018 (right)

(Photo: The Quint)

India’s budding scope for smart speakers has resulted in a first-ever analyst projection of the market. According to IDC’s latest report of the smart home market, Amazon leads the speaker category in the country with its Echo range of speakers, followed by Google with its Home series.

The overall segment which includes connected lights, smart speakers, connected thermostats, smart TVs, home monitoring/security products and digital media adapters saw good growth to reach 1.4 million shipments in Q2 2018.

Smart TVs are also slowly picking up in terms of market size, all thanks to Xiaomi and other affordable smart TV options that have started selling in the country this year. But coming back to smart speakers, consumers are slowly, but surely, warming up to these gadgets.

The trend for smart speakers, with built-in voice assistants will grow further in the coming years, with giants like Amazon, Google and even Microsoft working on products that acclimatise to local languages, with support for regional languages like Marathi, Tamil and Bengali among others as well.

Amazon’s 59 percent market share in this category has been catapulted by its Echo Dot speaker and then you have Google. While the report doesn’t indicate the average selling price of the speakers, it is likely to be within the Rs 10,000 bracket.

Clearly, there’s room for a lot of other brands to enter this space.

(Photo: IDC)

The chart here shows the rapid growth made by the smart speaker segment, but you’re still looking at the market heavily dominated by products like set-top-boxes, smart TVs and TV streaming devices like the Amazon Fire Stick.

IDC says that almost 8 out of 10 streaming devices sold in the country are Amazon Fire Sticks.

Most of the demand has been fuelled by the emergence of entertainment platforms like Hotstar and Netflix, all this propelled by the availability of affordable broadband and mobile internet.

It’s interesting to see where the smart home segment goes in India, especially with Amazon and Google sure to bring their new devices in the coming months.