Samsung accounts for 71 percent of the global smartwatch market

According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung controls the global smartwatch segment with a market share of 71 percent. The South Korean manufacturer shipped 500,000 smartwatches during the first three months of 2014, which is half of the 1 million sales it registered in all of 2013. The numbers do not account sales of Samsung's latest batch of smartwatches, which include the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo. Samsung's lead in this segment is due to the fact that it is one of the few manufacturers besides Sony to offer a smartwatch.
If you're looking to get a smartwatch from an OEM, your options are limited to Samsung's Galaxy Gear, Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Sony's SmartWatch 2. Non-traditional vendors like Pebble have also seen a modicum of success with the Pebble and the Pebble Steel. The smartwatch ecosystem is set for a major change in the coming months, as mainstream manufactures like LG, Motorola, HTC and Asus are set to unveil their smartwatches based on Google's Android Wear ecosystem.
LG's G Watch will debut later this month, and Motorola's Moto 360 is scheduled to launch sometime over the summer, possibly alongside the Moto X+1. Asus will unveil its first wearable, which will be a smartwatch, at Computex next month. There's no word as to when HTC will launch its smartwatch, but the latest rumors indicate a release sometime in the second half of 2014. It should be interesting to see the effect these launches will have on Samsung's market share over the course of the year. Motorola's Moto 360 – with its curved watchface – looks especially promising.