Apple Watch to get rival from Swatch

Swiss company to make smartwatch

When the Apple Watch was announced back in September of 2014 at an official event by CEO Tim Cook, one of the first things that analysts and consumers thought was when was a competing smartwatch going to be hitting the market. Now that news has come out that the Apple Watch will be coming out in April, the iconic Swiss watch maker Swatch has announced that they will have a smartwatch and that it could be coming out around the same time that the Apple Watch hits the market.

CEO Nick Hayek of the Swatch Group AG has announced that his company will have a smartwatch that will not have to be charged and that it will be run on an operating system known as NFC and that it will also be able to use Windows and Android applications. According to Citigroup, the smartwatch industry is looking to be one that will garner $10 billion in sales by the year of 2018. It looks as if Swatch and their colorful timepieces are looking to get in on a piece of that action.

This is a huge turnaround as far as Swatch’s outlook and forecast for the smartwatch industry. It was just two years ago that Hayek claimed that the smartwatch would be a short lived fad and would not have any sustainability. As a matter of fact, Hayek stated that his company would not even get into the smartwatch race altogether. He knew that his company had the technology and the engineers to develop a smartwatch but in the end it looks like he will be competing with the Apple Watch and it is looking like a head to head battle. It should be a competition that consumers will be interested in as Swatch filed numerous patents in 2014. One example is a battery that will be designed to last twice as long as their current batteries but still have the same size or smaller.

Source: Bloomberg