Wearables and the virtual society

It is certainly fascinating how such a big portion of our lives is highly engaged with and almost dependent on technology. We are gradually becoming people whose first move in the morning is to stretch the arm to look at what they “missed” while sleeping.

Following this link you’ll find a nice infographic from IDC, where most indicators tell us about a segment of our society that is not just moving towards but is already installed in a virtual setting. Technology is not a device anymore but part of their outfit.

What is the profile of this group? Tech savvy, hyper social and style conscious.

And this is specially interesting for marketing departments, because what should be sold here are not features, but lifestyle. More than “young” people, these are “tech savvy” people, which means that the age variable is highly influenced by the maturity of the market in terms of technology. A 45-year-old guy in Bolivia is probably not as used to these kind of technology as a 45-year-old guy in England.

How is Latin America doing? In Mexico alone 276* thousand wearables are expected to be sold during 2016, meaning US$62.6* million. We can assume that Mexico might represent 22% of the total units sold in the Latin America market, which means that a reasonable estimation of the total number of wearables expected to be sold in the region during 2016 is around 1.25 million. This represents about 1.3% of the worldwide market. Meaning 284 million dollars, a number estimated on the light of limited but fact-based information.

And this is interesting to see also from the technology perspective. The top-wearable features are highly linked to GPS capabilities such as instant coupons(67% of respondents*) and tracking health and fitness(80% of respondents*). This means that people adopting this technology can afford a strong-enough internet data plan for their devices to have internet connection in- and out-doors. Why is this important? Because the price to connect to internet is high, and the average purchasing power in emerging regions such as Latin America is relatively low. So the explosion of this market will be highly related to the improvement of the telecommunication infrastructure of the region and the decrease of overall cost for the end-user (final customer). For the moment, it is still a small market, still a niche market, with a high growth potential, and where the opportunity seems to be in entering into partnerships with carriers such as Movistar, Virgin mobile, VIVO, etc , to promote the use of wearables under special data-plans. That is, until a true explosion of wearables adoption, boosted by an improvement of the network and reduction of costs, hits the Latin America market.

For more views visit the site: Latin America Technology Board | Twitter

*Sources: IDC Latin America | IDC WW