The financial services firm has predicted that this tech category will grow to a business of $1.6 billion.
Wearable technology remains a tech category that is in its infancy, and while there is a rapidly growing number of devices continually being released – from smartwatches to smart jewelry and from augmented reality glasses to clothing with sensors – the analysts at Morgan Stanley have faith in the growth that it will experience and have released a promising forecast for its future.
They have predicted that it won’t be long before wearables become a $1.6 billion business.
This prediction about the future of wearable technology has come at a time in which there have been many different and conflicting opinions that have been released. While some believe that wearables could potentially replace other mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, others think that these gadgets will never entirely become mainstream. The prediction by Morgan Stanley falls somewhere in the middle of those extremes, but certainly indicates that the market has a chance and that it is only now getting started.
A note from Morgan Stanley showed that wearable technology is going to do far better than market expectations.
Analysts from the company wrote in the note that “Wearable devices will far surpass market expectations, and become the fastest ramping consumer technology device to date, in our view.” They also added that these mobile devices are going to have an impact that will be “far reaching” as they will form an entirely new category and will either disrupt or accelerate the evolution that has been occurring in industries beyond tech.
The analysts who wrote the Morgan Stanley note projected that wearables sales will grow at an annual compound rate of 154 percent from now through 2017. In that final year of the prediction, there will have been 248 million devices sold. That figure will only continue to rise through until 2020, when there will have been 1 billion wearable devices sold.
Morgan Stanley identified six different sectors that could be disrupted by wearable technology, which included: traditional wristwatches, apparel, payments, Chinese retail, healthcare, and industrials.
