Wearables market starts to bloom
 

Apple gave a boost to the wearables market with the launch of the iWatch earlier this year, but an IDC survey shows that there will be significant overall growth in the sector during 2015.

IDC estimates that 72.1 million units will ship this year, a growth of 173.2 percent from last year.

And over the next five years, wearables will show a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.6 percent, with 155.7 million units shipped in 2019.

But 2016 will be the real year for wearables, with a number of companies including Apple, Microsoft with its Hololens, Android Wear, Tizen and WatchOS all being active.

IDC research manager Ramon Llamas thinks that we’re seeing the “building blocks” of what lies ahead in the future.

IDC segments wearables into “wristwear”, “eyewear”, “modular”, “clothing”, “facewear” and other.

In the 1990s the then CEO of IBM, Lew Gerstner, forecast that technology would be embedded in our shoes but so far we haven’t seen examples, although we bet they’re about.

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