Company CEOs are always fully behind new products. They talk up the strengths, play down the weaknesses, throw around buzzwords and puff their chests to make sure their shiny new device is given as much attention as possibe. Not Huawei’s rotating CEO Eric Xu Zhijun. He’s a rebel.
“I am always confused as to what smartwatches are for when we have smartphones,” Xu Zhijun said at the company’s recent Global Analyst Summit, weeks after it released the Huawei Watch 2. Xu Zhijun, who runs a company that has released two smartwatches and a fitness watch, then doubled down, saying that he’d never want to wear a smartwatch himself.
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Xu Zhijun was later asked whether developing smartwatches, like the three versions of the Huawei Watch 2 the company showed off at Mobile World Congress 2017, would squeeze Huawei’s smartphone business. He said that “when the smartwatch team in Huawei presents their ideas to me in great excitement, I keep reminding them to consider whether there are tangible needs [for these products] in the market.”
To be fair, in our Huawei Watch 2 review we found the device to miss the mark. Since it appears Xu Zhijun feels the same way, maybe he should see what else is out there. Perhaps a nice hybrid smartwatch? Either this is some damage control on his part in anticipation of poor reviews, or another PR screw-up to add to the week’s list.
Source: South China Morning Post
SOURCE:https://www.wareable.com/huawei/huawei-ceo-smartwatch-diss-watch-2-4284
