According to CounterPoint Research estimate for the global smartwatch market in 2025…
- Apple grew 12%.
- Samsung fell 6%.
- Imoo grew by 17%.
Action replay: A Chinese brand that exclusively sells children’s watches is growing more than Appleand definitely more than Samsung, which is going down.
Imoo, what The year has already started growing in quotaalready has 7% of the global smartwatch market. And it doesn’t really compete against the Apple Watch Ultra or the current Galaxy Watch: compete against the anguish of not knowing where your child is when he leaves school. Or rather: against the fear of not knowing if one day something happens.
Counterpoint Research projects that the global smartwatch market will grow 7% in 2025 after first falling in 2024. That rebound is partly explained by Apple launching the cheap SE 3 and recovering after seven consecutive quarters of declines.
But there is another factor: China went from 25% global share in 2024 to 31% in 2025. And within that jump, Imoo has a specific role that perhaps we are not looking at closely enough.
Huawei is reinforcing its focus on health and sports, Apple maintains its inertia, Xiaomi focuses on the watch as part of a domestic ecosystem… and Imoo has turned parental fear into a product category. Their watches have GPS, calls, SOS button or alerts when the child leaves an area geofenced by his parents. As a watch it is not very smart and perhaps fits better in the category of surveillance and emergency aid device.
Imoo hasn’t invented parental fear, but it has built a great machine to monetize it. Besides, It is a device that creates functional dependency: Once a parent puts it on their child’s wrist, they get used to the peace of mind it provides. So it is difficult not to renew it when the child stamps it or when it becomes obsolete.
This success of Imoo goes beyond technology: when you grow 17% a year selling this type of watches, you do not measure adoption, but rather the number of parents who have decided that the anxiety that would cause them not knowing where their child is (understandable, of course) is worse than the inconvenience of constantly tracking them.
Once you cross that threshold, there is no turning back.
Previous generations had opaque spacesmoments of disappearance for a few hours before returning to dinner. These spaces are closed with this type of products, colorful and gamified, with a branding questionable but an unquestionable commercial success. Parents do not feel that they “control”, but rather that they protect. And kids don’t feel tracked, at least until they get acne and the bomb goes off, until then they just feel like they have a cool watch.
And there is an advantage for parents: if suddenly almost all of your child’s classmates have one, the fact that your child does not have one becomes an anomaly.
Imoo’s 7% share (and counting) measures how many children are growing up knowing that their parents can track them at any time. It measures a generation that normalizes permanent connectivity as a default state from the age of six.
Counterpoint speaks of the smart watch market with “China-driven growth” and “different strategies to sustain the engagement of the consumer”, but it does not mention that One of those strategies is to redefine a part of childhood.
The next son will also wear the watch. And the next one too. Imoo doesn’t need to grow faster than Apple to win. It just requires that each generation of parents find it more unthinkable than the previous one to leave a child unaccounted for.
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Featured image | Xataka
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