Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has offered a withering assessment of rival audio efforts from the major tech players, which would include Amazon, Google, and Apple.
The executive was speaking at Sonos’s Q1 2023 earnings call when he picked up on the fact (via The Verge) that he had “seen some of the traditional players go heavy discounting”. He said that this was a trend that his company had “always fought against and don’t really believe in”.
Spence then took a direct swipe at “the big tech players”, noting that “we just haven’t seen them active and we haven’t seen them, you know, doing anything interesting.”
Spence was clearly referring to Amazon, Google, and Apple – three major tech players who each compete with Sonos in the smart/multi-room speaker market.
We haven’t seen anything new from Amazon or Google on the speaker front for quite some time. Apple, meanwhile, just launched a new HomePod that looks suspiciously like the model it launched – and swiftly culled – a couple of years ago.
Indeed, Spence directly referenced Apple’s new product when he said “We never want to get overconfident in these things, but you know, even seeing what’s emerged, you know, recently, from Apple, I could not be more excited or confident about the product roadmap we have and our ability to take more and more of that $96 billion [global audio market]”.
Recent reports have suggested that Sonos is gearing up to launch two new spatial audio-centric speakers under the names Era 300 and Era 100. They’re apparently primed to battle the influx of smart speakers onto the brand’s traditional turf.
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