Illinois News Desk

Smart Speaker Market

Amazon is the first company to launch Alexa smart speaker named Echo in the year 2014, since then the company has been continuously introducing new version of its Echo series in the market. Amazon has been following the strategy of reducing the cost of old product after introducing a new version of the product. This strategy allows the company to capture high margins with early adopters and brand-conscious consumers. Amazon’s sound liquidity position with a large amount of cash in hand helped it to make huge strategic investments to enhance Alexa platform. Since, consumer technology products have shorter life cycles, so Amazon Alexa had a first-mover advantage in smart speaker market. Amazon has been the trendsetter in the voice enabled speaker market.

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Driven by Amazon’s accomplishment in smart speaker market, other technical companies quickly followed suit. In October 2016 Google launched Google Home speakers, and enhanced its product portfolio with the launch of Google Home Mini and Google Home Max in October 2017. In the same duration, Harman also launched Invoke smart speaker integrated with Cortana virtual assistance.

Despite apparent dominance of Amazon and Google with a combined market share of more than 70%, the competitive landscape for both the companies is expected change in 2018, when Apple will enter in the market with its Siri smart speaker HomePod. HomePod will be equipped with the features of Siri and have wireless access to the entire Apple Music Library. Currently, Apple has fewer products and severe third-party policy, but company’s established market for smart devices is expected to drive the sales of HomePod in coming years.

Further, as gaps or opportunities emerge, tech giants moved swiftly and incisively to build the necessary capability or capacity and launched their products through inorganic growth strategies thus enhancing product portfolio and expanding their customer base in smart speaker market.  For instance, companies such as Harman, Sonos, Onkyo, and Pioneer have partnered with Amazon to integrate Alexa platform into their smart speakers. While, companies such as Bose, Sony, and Onkyo partnered with Google to integrate Google Assistant platform in their smart speakers.

Moreover, to cater the increasing consumer demand and sustain growth, smart speaker offering companies are increasingly investing in R&D activities to offer smarter and more convenient devices. For instance, Amazon is offering USD 100 million in venture capital funding and a software development kit to develop its smart speaker IVA platform Alexa to third -party developers.

Since the inception of smart speaker, new product launch and development was the key strategies adopted by the companies in the smart speaker market, with a share of about 80% followed by partnership and collaboration strategy with a share of 15% in 2017.  Product innovation is expected to drive more comparison amongst consumers and increase device sales.  

Key component driving the demand for smart speaker is not the hardware but the voice assistance platform, which is already pervasive in smart phones and can be inbuilt to any smart speaker.

Table below depicts the skills and inorganic strategy adopted by key IVA offering companies:

Considering that majority of the third-party smart speakers offering companies have collaborated or partnered with Amazon for Alexa integration, the company is expected to capture major market through Alexa, despite losing the actual hardware sale for next few years.

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