Chinese device maker Huawei has launched the Huawei Fit to its growing line-up of wearable technology products. Huawei Fit comes with dynamic heart monitoring, an over-training alert, all-day heart monitoring and several other features as outlined below. The product is the seventh one that Huawei has launched in the category of wearable tech, and it comes at a time when FitBit is struggling with revenue growth.
Earlier this month FitBit released its most recent quarterly earnings, and the numbers weren’t good. That, and the low expectations that FitBit set for investors for the rest of fiscal 2016 saw the stock price losing as much as 34% within 24 hours of the earnings release.
Must Read: GoPro and FitBit Find that Hardware is a Hard Market, Stocks Tank Post Earnings Release
While Huawei is not generally known as a major player in wearable tech, and is generally grouped along with companies like Sony and Motorola that use the Android Wear operating system, this particular model – Huawei Fit – has a bare-bones operating system that’s easy on the battery and gives you up to 6 days on a two-hour charge – under test conditions, of course.
But in terms of sales, the entire range of Android Wear brands only sold 4.8 million units over a two year period spanning 2014 and 2015. That’s very small compared to FitBit’s sales for the same period, which came in at nearly 32 million units. In fact, in just the first quarter alone FitBit sold 4.8 million units.
Huawei’s products may not be as popular as FitBit, but it carries pretty much all the features you’d want from a fitness tracker, such as 5ATM water resistance for swimmers, daily activity tracking, multi-sports mode, sleep monitoring, personal running coach, always-on screen, changeable bands and so on. It is also compatible with Android as well as iOS so you can use it along with your current smartphone.
Looking at the price point of the Huawei, the $129 retail price is much more attractive than the FitBit Blaze, for example, which has much of the same functionality but retails for about $189 on Walmart.com.
As a company, Huawei is no small fry. Last year the company posted revenues of more than $60 billion with an impressive growth of 37% over the previous year.
In contrast, Fitbit reported sales of $1.86 billion for 2015 and guidance of between $2.320 billion and $2.345 billion, representing growth of 25%-26%.
To be fair, FitBit doesn’t have the wide range of devices that Huawei does so it’s not a like to like comparison, but it does show the kind of money muscle that Huawei has to promote its products, whether that’s internet dongles, smartphones, tablets or wearable tech products like Huawei Fit.
Thanks for reading our work! Please bookmark 1redDrop.com to keep tabs on the hottest, most happening tech and business news from around the world. On Apple News, please favorite the 1redDrop channel to get us in your news feed.
