These Demographic Stats Suggest The Apple Watch Could Be A Hit

Despite breathless reports ahead of the imminent, official launch of the Apple AAPL +0.85% Watch today, there’s still a fierce debate over whether the Apple Watch will be a hit or a flop.

Commentators point out that the market for smart watches is still new. Apple needs to bring some ‘magic’ to the nascent market to spur adoption.

It also needs to make a compelling use case for the Watch, and that hasn’t been an easy ride for Apple. Its original plan for the device has pivoted from focusing deeply on health, to hitting the right notes on fashion.

All that suggests the Apple Watch faces an uphill struggle to reach even mediocre sales. Yet demographic numbers for the market that already exists for smart watches made by the likes of LG, Sony and Samsung suggests a helpful path might already be set for Apple’s new wrist computer.

Around 9.5% of Internet users personally own a smart watch, according to the GlobalWebIndex, which surveyed 41,983 people in 32 countries in the fourth quarter of 2014. That suggests Apple will be gunning for a repeat of its past success jumping into nascent markets like music players, when it launched the iPod in 2001, and smartphones, when it launched the first iPhone in 2007.

But there’s better news for Apple, thanks to the demographic makeup of those people who already own smart watches. It relates to a recent story by Kevin Roose at Fusion about how Apple’s new drive to create luxury gadgets costing upwards of $10,000 suggest it’s banking on a world with greater income disparity.

High-income consumers are already the ones who tend to buy smart watches. “It’s always this group which is furthest ahead for iPhone or iPad usage,” says GlobalWebIndex senior analyst Janson Mander. (Click here for the full report.)

Better yet, a third of the world’s smart watch owners already own an iPhone too, according to the stats.

In Europe, only about 4% of Internet users own a smart watch, Mander adds. This doesn’t mean Europeans have an aversion to wrist-based gadgets, but rather that Apple fans there are largely waiting for the Apple Watch to arrive before buying into the category. 

“The Apple Watch will therefore have a captive audience unlike any smart watch which has gone before it,” said Mander. “Many iPhone and iPad users will buy one simply because it’s an Apple product, not because they were in the market for a smart watch per se.”

One challenge is that people in their teens and early 20s show themselves to be most interested in wearing smart watches, but they fall behind those in their late 20s and 30s when it comes to ownership, likely because they’re priced out of the market.

Unless Apple makes its Watch affordable enough for teens and college students, the gadget’s keenest market won’t be buying one any time soon.