The Current Status and Trends of Wireless Headphones

The Current Status of Wireless Headphones

In 2021, the number of Bluetooth headsets shipped in China was around 120 million units, with a year-on-year increase of 21.1%.

It is estimated that China's Bluetooth headset market shipments may reach approximately 130 million units in 2022, with an increase of 13.1% year-on-year. In recent years, the output value of wireless headsets has been on a continuous growth trend, growing from 21 billion yuan in 2016 to 82.2 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 40.66%, and hopfully will reach 110.5 billion yuan till the end of 2022.

The Trends of Wireless Headphones

As the increasing trend of product diversification, Bluetooth headset product forms have been dominated by true wireless products for a long time, of which shank-type in-ear headphones along with the popularity of active noise cancellation function shipments soared, leading the true wireless headset market in 2021 and achieving a year-on-year growth of 59%. With more entry-level products entering the offline channel to drive market penetration, shipments of bean-style headphones achieved a growth of 34% year-on-year in 2021,too.

In addition, bone conduction products in Bluetooth headsets continue to grow, with segmented scenarios such as sports gradually catalyzing the market to win more attention.

There is still more space in the down market to explore since the Bluetooth headset market is dominated by online channel sales with online channel shipments accounting for 69% in 2021. The rapid development of the online channel has significantly advanced market penetration in the more developed regions. With the development of live e-commerce and many e-commerce platforms with concentrated downstream traffic, Bluetooth headsets are also penetrating more downstream markets through these types of platforms.

In addition, the proportion of offline channels increased by 4 % year-on-year in 2021, with more entry-level products participating in the process of penetrating the down-market. In the future, as mobile phone manufacturers become more deeply involved and lay out, there will still be more room for the downstream market.

Although the true wireless headset market is driven by the entry-level market, the trend in the price bracket shows a clear trend towards a small upgrade in the market up to RMB200. In 2021 we noticed a decline in the share of products up to RMB100 and a significant increase in the share of products between RMB100-200. Based on the data of 2021 bluetooth headset martket, in 2022, we may see a significant growth in shipments of products between RMB100-200 and RMB200-400.