India’s budget smartwatch bubble bursts: Sales plummet, i…

The market for low-cost smartwatches, which saw a massive surge, is now contracting sharply. Companies rebadge white-label products with no real upgrades, leaving customers disinterested.

NEW DELHI: India’s gadget buyers are shunning inexpensive smartwatches, a category that saw a massive surge in demand until two years ago. A lack of customer enthusiasm for barebone alternatives to the benchmark Apple Watch as well as existing buyers finding them unworthy of a second-time purchase, have caused smartwatch sales in the country to drop to its lowest in sales volumes and revenue in four calendar years.

Data sourced by Mint from market researcher International Data Corporation (IDC) India showed that 28.9 million smartwatches were sold in 2025, generating net revenue of $780 million. This marks a stark 43.9% decline in revenue from $1.39 billion in 2023, a record year with 53.4 million units sold. Last year was the weakest for smartwatch sales, lower than 30.7 million units sold in 2022 and 35.1 million sold in 2024.

The drop in demand is because of the absence of any innovation in budget smartwatches and the absence of returning buyers after over 150 million devices were sold in the past five years. Companies taking the hardest hit include public markets-bound Boat, publicly listed The Titan Company, Gurugram-based Noise and Mumbai-based Fire-Boltt. As per IDC, Titan sold 2.6 million smartwatches in 2025, down 21%.

Titan has acknowledged this impact. “Smartwatches declined 27% YoY due to significant contraction in volumes, though pricing was largely steady YoY,” Titan said in its December quarter investor presentation. Suparna Mitra, chief executive officer of Titan’s smartwatch division, acknowledged the impact as well during its June quarter analyst call on 7 August. “Smartwatches have gone through a big correction.

I think a lot of it happened last year in calendar year ‘24. It continues to be somewhat subdued right now, after a lot of corrections in terms of oversupply, undercutting of price, etc. We are at this point maintaining and gaining market share and coming out with newer products which should do well. But yes, the very overheated kind of growth that we have seen in smartwatches in calendar years ‘21, ‘22 and ‘23, that phase is over now,” Mitra had said.

In 2023, Fire-Boltt led India’s smartwatch sales with a 24.3% market share, selling almost 13 million watches that year. As of 2025, IDC data shows Fire-Boltt’s market share to be 9.7%, having sold less than 3 million units. Noise, too, has struggled. From about 12 million smartwatches sold in 2023, its sales dipped to 7.7 million last year. Noise, as per IDC data, is India’s largest smartwatch seller with almost 27% of the market.

Boat’s smartwatch sales dipped to 4.1 million in 2025 from 7.5 million in 2023. The drop has led Boat to pivot away from smartwatches and focus on wireless earbuds. Mint’s analysis of Boat’s IPO documents and IDC’s data showed that smartwatches now account for about one-fourth of its gross revenue, with the rest mostly coming from audio products. Amit Khatri, cofounder of Noise, said the wearables category in India is undergoing a natural recalibration rather than a structural decline.

“After a sharp adoption curve over the last few years, we’re now seeing upgrade cycles normalize, consumers become more discerning, and the market consolidate, where quality, performance, and trust matter more than frequent discount-led purchases. That’s a sign of category maturity.” For Noise, this phase reinforces the firm's long-term approach, he added. “While shipments across the category can fluctuate, we continue to see strong brand momentum, market share gains, expanding distribution, and healthy repeat behaviour, with ~20% of customers returning within 12 months,” he said.

Boat and Fire-Boltt did not immediately respond to Mint’s queries over text and email. However, stakeholders said the continued decline marks a systemic challenge that India’s electronics companies face. “Around the time of the pandemic, a wave of focus on health created an organic demand for wearable devices,” said Navkendar Singh, associate vice-president at IDC India. “Smartwatches flourished at that time, but in order to try and capture as much of the market as possible, each of the homegrown brands rebadged white-label products, built their own custom software interfaces, and sold smartwatches at prices that were falling almost everyday.” Singh added that the sustained lowering of prices left little room for innovation, and therefore, no real reason for customers to return to them.

“Buyers who got themselves a smartwatch three to five years ago are today realizing that there’s no hook to upgrade their devices. Most inexpensive smartwatches will still offer basic fitness statistics to entry-level users, and there are no devices to upgrade to since budget smartwatches have remained the same, and the flagship ones from Apple, Google and Samsung are too expensive for most,” he added.

“The extremely low prices of smartwatches in India mean that brands hardly have any margin, and whatever money they make gets consumed by marketing expenses such as appointing top athletes as brand ambassadors,” said Prabhu Ram, vice-president of industry intelligence at CyberMedia Research. “There are also no good mid-range smartwatches, such as around the ₹8,000 to ₹15,000 price bracket.” Manish Khatri, a partner at Mumbai-based electronics retailer Mahesh Telecom, said the curiosity around smartwatches from two years ago is “practically dead now”.

“At the peak of the pandemic and just after that, many smartphone brands ran campaigns targeting buyers with free smartwatches for buying a phone. Buyers would be quite interested in such deals. Today, these bundles have completely died out from the market as buyers are just not keen on budget smartwatches. They simply see no value,” Khatri said.

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