Welcome to the first edition of our SYNNEX-New Age Electronics Emerging Tech Newsletter. This publication is intended to provide information and insights into new categories and products. At SYNNEX-New Age Electronics, we are committed to supporting our retailers’ growth through exciting, new, and innovative products that are a natural extension to traditional CE assortment. Our team meets with manufacturers from around the world to determine if they have products that would be successful in U.S. retail, that the company has a roadmap for sustained success, and that it is truly “Retail Ready.” We don’t bring product to our retailers until they have received our stamp of approval by meeting these criteria.
While our product management team continues to look at a broad array of products, we have focused on several categories that we believe will deliver the highest growth and are a natural extension to existing retail assortments. These categories include wearable tech, home automation & security, home health, and tracking. We continue to monitor interesting categories like 3D printing, smart toys, audio, and, in general, app-enabled devices.
Wearable tech is experiencing its second high-growth holiday, especially in the activity and fitness tracking sub-category. We believe that smart watches are intriguing to many consumers; however, sales won’t really take off for this sub-category until holiday 2015, when manufacturers meet the functional and fashion needs of consumers. Overall, wearable tech is projected to grow by 44% in 2015, and smart watches are projected to overtake activity and fitness trackers by 2018. We are confident this will become a significant category very shortly.
Our home automation and security focus is on the do-it-yourself segment. We see many innovated products coming to market that consumers can install themselves. Many retailers have committed online or in-store departments to the category. We believe it will be important to organize products by “platform” in order to tell the story of extensibility to consumers and ensure they purchase the right product for their hub. Category signage is critical to the success of these products, similar to the networking category in its early stages.
While traditional CE and mass merchants have yet to dabble in the home health space, many should take notice of the array of app-enabled devices that promote and track healthy living that are out or are coming to market. Some products allow the user to take the information to their doctors for review.
Tracking is an exciting new category that allows the user to track the location of anything from car keys, a car, a child, a pet or anything else. This category will reach critical mass in Q2 and will justify dedicated space in-store and online.
