Fossil sees strong China market potential for smart devices

US-headquartered watch and apparel maker Fossil Group will launch more products with local features to seek further strong growth in the booming Chinese smart watch market.

Fossil Group grew its business at double-digit rates in China in the first quarter.

“We have large ambitions and targets for the Chinese market," Annemiek Ballesty, senior vice president and managing director in China for Fossil Group, said in an interview with Shanghai Daily during the Consumer Electronics Show Asia in Shanghai.

“Chinese consumers are increasingly aware of smart watches and the combination of a healthy lifestyle, and we’ve seen higher demand for sports features in recent years in China.

"They are also more tech savvy than outside of China and want to connect wearable devices with the entire ecosystem."

Fossil Sport, a more lively and lightweight version of Fossil smart watches that comes in six colors with the latest Qualcomm platform and Google Wear’s OS, made its debut at this year's CES Asia.

In the next few months, it’s expected to launch new models with smaller and slimmer smart watches with more lightweight features as well as longer battery life to ride the latest market trends. After entering the Chinese market in 2017, Fossil been following the local market trends and working closely with local partners in the digital ecosystem to offer products and services.

"We've seen that sports functionality such as heart rate tracking and sleep monitoring are especially popular in China across all age groups, and Chinese consumers also want their wearable devices to connect with social networks and mobile payments to make their life more convenient, for example NFC payment for offline merchants and transportation," Ballesty said.

As a fashion brand Fossil has been offering consumers many different brands and plenty of color variations and at the same time offering simple and easy-to-use technology features. It’s also working towards the perfect combination of technology and design through in-house software and hardware engineers.

Ballesty said that for Fossil’s product offerings in China, the marketing and commercial teams get involved with products at a very early stage to work with local customers and partners and ensure a better experience for consumers.

"We want to make sure the wearable devices and the operating system look and feel right," she explained.

For example, in China it works with Google-backed voice assistant Mobvoi that allows users to connect to local social platforms.

At the global level, Fossil has a number of licensing agreements with apparel brands to design, manufacture and distribute smart watches on their behalf.

"We are working closely with the apparel designers and the fashion brands to keep their DNA in terms of design elements and style while at the same time provide the Fossil smart watch user experience," she said.

Speaking of future trends, she pointed out that higher connection speeds with the coming 5G network would allow more functions to be performed and experienced on wearable devices, and app developers would also be able to leverage the Internet of Things to integrate more services for users.