Amazon Echo Smart Speakers Outselling Google Home

As smart speakers surge in popularity, Amazon Echo is the clear leader, outselling Google Home by a wide margin, SlashGear reported on Friday (Nov. 15), citing research from analyst firm Canalys.

The report shows that worldwide smart speaker sales during the third quarter (Q3) of 2019 are 45 percent higher compared to the same period last year.

Aside from Amazon and Google, smaller competitors like Apple, Xiaomi, and Alibaba are also notching sales. Google was the only brand in the top five smart speaker space to see sales drop in Q3 2019.

Amazon is the sales leader capturing 36.6 percent of the smart speaker market with 10.4 million in Echo sales and 65.9 percent annual growth. China’s Alibaba ranked second, capturing 13.6 percent of the market. Chinese smart speaker manufacturer Baidu was third, with 13.1 percent and Google came in next, with 12.3 percent. Xaomi was fifth, with 12 percent of the market share, the report showed.

Canalys points to Amazon’s aggressive marketing and competitive pricing as factors that gives the Echo an edge. Google’s angle has been to promote Home as a premium product.

“Amazon introduced the Echo Upgrade Program to entice users to trade-in old Echo or non-Echo Bluetooth speakers to further increase Echo device penetration in the household,” said Jason Low, senior analyst at Canalys.

“The challenging retail environment and shipment decline compelled Google to seek more partnerships such as with Spotify, to drive sales through different channels. We are also seeing similar collaboration trends in China where Alibaba leveraged its retail relationship and channel capabilities to run smart speaker collaborations with brands such as Starbucks, Budweiser, Abbott and Oreo among other local and international companies. This has largely increased the consumer appeal of Tmall Genie devices,” he added.

Amazon’s lead has remained fairly commanding and complete since launching the Echo and Alexa in 2014. Alexa is found in more than 60,000 smart home devices from 7,400 companies, whereas Google Assistant is found on about around 10,000 devices from more than 1,000 companies.