The market research firm Canalys released its latest Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Analysis service, which showed that the worldwide shipments of VR headsets exceeded 1 million units per quarter in Q3 2017. According to their results, Sony was the clear market leader with a market share of 49%, followed by Facebook / Oculus with 21% and HTC with 16%. All other hardware manufacturers combined for 14% of the 1 million units shipped in that quarter.
Canalys sees the price drop of the Oculus Rift to $399 as the main reason for the good showing of the Oculus headset and also expect even better results with the $199 Oculus Go announced for 2018. They also expect accelerated growth of the whole market once the Microsoft MR platform hits the market at the end of 2017.
As Canalys points out, their numbers do not differentiate between consumer and business customers. Indeed they expect the Microsoft MR platform to gain significant market share in business applications. It will also be interesting to see where the emerging standalone headsets will fall into this market as they trade performance and usage time for freedom of movement.
Analyst Comment
While some maybe surprised about this result being shown as a new shipment high, please keep in mind that Canalys does not count smartphone-based headsets like Samsung Gear VR in their numbers. This explains why IDC reported almost 2.3 million units shipped for Q1 2017. Different market and product definitions lead to very different numbers.
All in all a million units per quarter is a good development for the nascent VR market with an astonishingly strong showing form Sony. There seem to be two contributors to this development. First, being based on the Sony Playstation 4, Sony has a strong installed base and has a whopping 80% market share in Japan. Secondly, the long time experience of the Sony 3D viewer seem to have helped them with the ergonomics of the headset and overall design requirements. (NH)
