The Influx of HMOV Intensified Competition in the TWS Headphone Market

The market for TWS headphones exploded as apple's technical barriers were circumvented and manufacturers poured in. Worldwide TWS headset shipments reached 120 million pairs in 2019, up 161% year on year. With AirPods accounting for half of the market, and more and more android phone makers entering the market in 2020, has apple ever had a good time?

Apple's AirPods account for 50% of the market

Apple is a pioneer and leader in the TWS headphone market. Apple has dominated the TWS headphone market since 2016. Apple shipped about 60 million AirPods globally in 2019, accounting for 50 percent of the global TWS headphone market.

It is well known that TWS headphones need to be connected to the phone, but in 2019, global sales of android phones outnumbered iPhone sales by six to one, and the two sides drew even. Why?

RUNTO believes the limitations of bluetooth connectivity are the main reason android TWS have lagged behind apple AirPods in recent years.

TWS (true wireless stereo) earphone and ordinary wireless bluetooth earphone have essential difference, the latter through bluetooth chip can make earphone and mobile phone to achieve 1 to 1 connection, the former two earplugs between no wires, and mobile phone connection needs to achieve 1 to 2 connection.

Apple's Snoop listening mode allows the ears to listen to the signals sent by the phone through certain rules, and find the signals of the main ear or the ears respectively from the received signals.

However, the general TWS earphone manufacturers cannot skip the patent barriers of Snoop monitoring mode, and can only adopt Relay forwarding mode, which means the audio is transmitted from the phone to the main device, and then the main device is forwarded to the secondary device. The forwarding mode has many problems in stability, power consumption and other aspects, which makes the consumer experience greatly reduced. After all, the advent of bluetooth 5.0 in 2016 did not substantially improve the performance of the forwarding mode, despite gains in transmission rate and transmission distance.

Breakthrough in new connection technology

Until 2019, MTK, qualcomm, huawei and other enterprises launched new solutions respectively, which greatly reduced the latency and gradually became closer to apple's monitoring scheme in terms of connectivity, laying a technical foundation for the wide application of android products.

Threshold is reduced, the rise of the market, many participants piling, including huawei, millet, OPPO, vivo, mobile phone manufacturers such as SONY, Bose, rambler, JBL, traditional audio manufacturers such as 1 more, go to ask, such as start-up, Beijing, Tokyo, netease and other Internet companies, as well as the low end of the white card manufacturers, market shows the status of the schools of thought contend.

According to RUNTO statistics, by February 2020, the number of android phone brands that have released TWS headphones has reached 15, and the head brands such as huawei, glory, xiaomi, OPPO and vivo have all entered the bureau. They are getting close to apple in quality and far lower in price.

Brands are squeezing the white market

At present, there are a lot of white brand products in the TWS earphone market, and the price is less than 200 yuan. Low-cost products play an important role in educating the market and users' trial and error, but as users' demand for product experience increases, shanzhai manufacturers' living space will be squeezed. At the same time, the outbreak of covid-19 will accelerate the elimination of a number of small and medium-sized enterprises. As a strongly related product of TWS headphones, mobile phone brand manufacturers will greatly increase their share by virtue of brand and product quality advantages, as well as the ecology formed between TWS headphones and mobile phones.

Covid-19 has evolved into a global pandemic, which will affect the production and supply of TWS headphones in the short term. But demand for the hottest product in consumer electronics in the past two years will not be dampened. According to RUNTO, global TWS headset shipments will continue to grow in 2020, and are expected to exceed 230 million pairs. Mobile phone brands, especially in China, will rise.