Business Week reports on a new survey by Seiko that indicates that ownership of wrist watches has fallen from 70% in 1997 to only 46% today. Why? People use their mobiles to tell the time these days.
I’m sure this is a trend that’s happening in the West too, though perhaps not quite so fast. What will companies give retiring employees instead? Gold mobiles don’t have quite the same cachet.
Interestingly though, while shipments of new watches are down by 1/3 over the last decade in Japan, sales value has actually increased by 8%. People are buying more expensive watches, which seems to mean that the function of the watch is changing from a time piece to a fashion statement.
When industries start collapsing, it can happen very quickly. Just observe how fast the stand-alone MP3 market disappears as a mass market proposition. If it hasn’t peaked last year, 2006 is the start of a market implosion.
“What will companies give retiring employees instead?”
What about http://www.goldvish.com/ ?
I don’t use a watch anymore…
Link: Death Knell for Watches at MobHappy. I was just browsing through MobHappy — it’s been a while since I caught up with my required reading — and saw Russell’s post here on the death knell for watches: usiness Week…
i beg to differ.
maybe seiko watches are declining, maybe because they are competing in the same ‘time-telling’ place as phones.
the watch industry is absolutely centuries mature and we still have people buying them. i see everyone still wearing watches, and i think watches have become more objects of fashion and prestige than simple time telling tools.
for example, i just picked up a suunto t6. i use it for collecting running data (heart rate, distance, altitude, and speed) - hopefully a post will come out of it, so you’ll read more later. it presses on my mind when i only use it for time, since it does so much (it’s a ‘wrist computer’ indeed).
also, my second watch is a tissot, worn because it self-winding and is retro-cool.
my third watch is a simple casio with a great timer (my original running watch). it works for me.
oh, i use my phone for a lot of time keeping and alarms on travel and such. but my phone can never compete with these watches for their other functions.
what do you think?
Hi Russell and Mobhappy Blogsite
Excellent posting as usual. Great catch of the stat. I blogged about it already as well of course mentioning you spotted it first.
Specifically to comment on what Charlie wrote about. Please do NOT try to project your own behaviour on the general public. The evidence from Seiko - definitely NOT in their interest to release this kind of data - was on the 16-49 year old age demographic in Japan, NOT just Seiko customers.
Japan is a very highly fashion-conscious market (considered the biggest fashion market on the planet by the fashion industry) and also one with one of the most advanced mobile markets. Japan was the first market to report that young consumers’ spending was shifting away from fashion purchases due to spendning on mobile - this in 2001, a year before the same was proven in advanced European markets.
All anecdotal evidence around the world suggests ONLY a shift away from wristwatches in favour of mobile phone based clocks - not one study or reported customer instance of going the other way.
The May 2006 study by Nokia of over 5000 consumers around the world revealed that 73% of us use the phone as our wristwatch and 72% use the alarm clock feature on the phone.
Now this Seiko study from Japan is the first to prove it from “the other side” ie the wristwatch makers’ side - that of their customers, one in THREE have abandoned the wristwatch.
Charlie - open your eyes. Look at the under 30 year olds around you. Are they all wearing wearing wristwatches? No.
Some do, but an increasing proportion of them, from Finland to the Philippines, from Sweden to South Africa, from Belgium to Brazil and from Korea to Canmada are all following the same pattern.
Just because you happen to carry a watch and apparently have several, does not mean all are going to behave like you.
Trust the numbers of these kinds of surveys. If Seiko reveals this level of cannibalization, I would not put it past the Casios, Timexes and Swatches having already found in their surveys even WORSE statistics that they are just afraid to publish.
The phone will totally dominate the clock/watch space. Yes, it does not mean the end of the watchmaker market just like cameraphones have not killed off digital cameras - a wedding photographer will not show up with a Nokia - but the mass market will all go to mobiles, like PDAs, digital cameras, MP3 players and now wristwatches.
In my humble opinion (ha ha and as I wrote way back then in my second bestselling book m-Profits in 2002)
Tomi Ahonen
4-time besttselling author and consultant
lecturing on high tech at Oxford University
and frequent industry forecaster for mobile and IT
website http://www.tomiahonen.com
blogsite http://www.communities-dominate.blogs.com