Even Apple’s rivals want the iWatch to succeed

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iwatch
Samsung and LG are hoping Apple can light the way when it comes to wearables.

Apple could be less than one week away from unveiling its long-awaited iWatch, and surprisingly for an industry as competitive as tech, pretty much everyone is rooting on it to succeed.

The reason? Because once Apple cracks open a market and shows how it can be done, everyone else can dive in and make more money.

“If Apple offers its own product, it will expand the market,” Sung-jin Lee, director of LG Electronics’ watch product planning team, told Reuters in an interview.

“This is what we wanted,” Sunny Lee, CEO of Samsung’s European business noted of Apple’s impending wearables debut.

Perhaps the most damning comment in the article comes from mobile analyst Ben Wood of market research firm CCS Insight, who describes what wearables companies have been doing up to this point as “just public prototyping” for Apple’s arrival.

While Samsung currently dominates the smartwatch market, with 74 percent, numbers are tiny compared to the booming smartphone industry. Compared to the 1.3 billion mobile phones expected to sell in 2015, only 1 million smartwatches shipped in Q2, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

Some analyst estimates have suggested that, with the help of the “halo effect” of brand loyalty to Apple, the company could sell between 30-60 million iWatches in its first year alone.

Source: Reuters

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