Amazon AMZNand Alphabet’s GOOGLGoogle have been leading the smart speaker market for quite some time now with their Echo and Home devices, launched in 2014 and 2016, respectively.
Per a latest report by Strategy Analytics, Amazon leads the market with 43.6% of all smart speakers shipped during the first quarter.
On the other hand, growing popularity of Google smart speakers with the introduction of Google Home Mini led to an increase in its share from 12.5% in the first quarter of 2017 to 26.5% in first quarter of 2018.
However, Amazon’s leading position faces threats from new offerings from the likes of Apple AAPL, Alibaba BABAand Xiaomi, which hold 7.6%, 6% and 2.4% of market share, respectively. The firm believes that strong demand for smart speakers in China, where Amazon and Google do not have a presence, benefited Alibaba and Xiaomi, pushing them into the top five.
Alibaba’s Tmall Genie and Xiaomi’s Mi AI Speaker were both launched in July 2017. This is the first time that all these companies are in direct competition with Apple as the HomePod devices were launched this February after months of delay.