Will the Apple Watch outsell the entire Swiss watch industry next year?

It might be an accurate assessment. The research firm Strategy Analytics has calculated that 22.5 million Apple Watches were shipped in 2018, while the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry said the industry exported 23.7 million watches in the same period.

Reports now suggest that 2019 will be the first year Apple outsells the entire Swiss watch industry by volume... More here.

Not many articles fit both of my sites, but this one surely does. I wrote about this recently for Scottish Watches and I genuinely do believe that the smartwatch will have a huge impact, but likely more on the non-Swiss industry first.

Many of us who love watches regularly dismiss smartwatches as temporary, classless, overpriced and with a myriad of other negative connotations that come straight from our love of watches. We perceive them from a place of passion, from the closed mind of a person who loves the minuscule details of a good watch, the details that others never consider, and we somehow then perceive smartwatches to be lesser.

The problem is that it does not matter what we think because we are a tiny minority. The majority will eventually come round to smartwatches just as they did when a few of us carried around Psion and Palm PDAs and they dismissed them as toys for geeks. Those people all now walk around with much more advanced smartphones and think nothing of it.

I cannot be sure what will actually happen to the watch industry in the near future and there is no way to know for sure if smartwatches will come to dominate, but it would be foolhardy to consider any other trend than one where the smartwatch seriously impacts the budget watch market, if for no other reason than a budget watch not having much of an emotional hook for the majority of people.