Sales of consumer electronics across Chinese markets have surged during the Lunar New Year buying season, and one product stands out: AI‑powered smart glasses. Retail activity in Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei — the mainland’s most important electronics bazaar — has shown a sustained upswing in the two months leading to the holiday, with overall technology sales rising more than 30% and the number of foreign merchants present doubling. Within that boom, AI glasses recorded the strongest momentum, with sellers reporting a 70–80% jump in sales.
Government policy has sharpened the commercial opportunity. China’s trade‑in subsidy scheme now explicitly covers digital and smart devices, including smart glasses; purchases of eligible items priced at or below 6,000 yuan qualify for a 15% rebate capped at 500 yuan per unit. That kind of direct consumer incentive, timed around a major gift‑buying festival, has compressed the path from curiosity to purchase for many shoppers.
The market dynamism reflects more than temporary price nudges. Multiple core technologies — compact optics, low‑power processors, and on‑device AI models — have advanced rapidly, pushing the product beyond the realm of niche industrial headsets. Analysts at China Galaxy Securities frame the change as an efficiency gain: modest hardware cost increases can unlock disproportionately richer user experiences, making smart glasses an obvious upgrade for existing spectacle and sunglass wearers.
International incumbents are scaling quickly. EssilorLuxottica, the owner of Ray‑Ban, said its collaboration with Meta yielded more than threefold growth in sales of smart glasses in 2025 and reported selling over 7 million units last year. The company and Meta are reportedly negotiating to double annual production capacity to around 20 million units or more, a signal that mainstream global demand could be far larger than early adopters’ figures suggest.
On the supply side, Chinese manufacturers already dominate assembly and components for the category; research firms estimate AI smart glasses comprised 78% of smart‑glasses shipments in the first half of 2025 and project global AI glasses shipments could reach about 20 million by 2028. Domestic brokerages such as Huafu Securities describe the industry as having exited an engineering‑verification phase dominated by bulky AR/MR headsets and entered a “consumerization window” led by lighter forms and embedded AI capabilities.
That transition carries practical product consequences. Design priorities have shifted toward weight, comfort and everyday aesthetics as use cases migrate from industrial and medical deployments toward commuter assistance, first‑person video capture and glanceable information. Simultaneously, the integration of larger AI models at the edge is turning eyewear from display or camera hardware into portable AI terminals capable of on‑the‑spot reasoning.
The sector’s questions now read less like “can we build it?” and more like “will people wear it every day?” The answer depends on a handful of constraints: battery life and heat management, price and subsidy math, fashion partnerships and social acceptance, and the availability of compelling native applications. Privacy and regulatory scrutiny will also intensify as glasses capture first‑person audio and video and surface AI‑generated content in real time.
For foreign and domestic players alike, the near term will be dominated by capacity expansion, product refinement and ecosystem plays. If smart glasses clear the usability bar, they could become a new touchpoint for everything from navigation and translation to commerce and advertising, shifting how attention is captured and monetised in the post‑smartphone era.