HUAWEI has launched two smartwatches, but its CEO still doesn't know what they are for

HUAWEI has launched two Android Wear smartwatches so far; the HUAWEI Watch in 2015 and more recently the HUAWEI Watch 2. Yet, the current leader of the company doesn’t seem to be convinced that the smartwatch industry is going to be successful.

According to the South China Morning Post, Eric Xu Zhijun, HUAWEI’s rotating CEO, was quoted as saying, “I am always confused as to what smartwatches are for when we have smartphones.” He made those remarks earlier today as part of HUAWEI’s 2017 Global Analyst Summit.

In fact, Zhijun says that when the company’s smartwatch team makes presentations to him, he has to remind those team members that there has to be some real needs in the marketplace for those kinds of devices. It sounds like he is not quite convinced that such a need exists at the moment for smartwatches, even though HUAWEI has released two of them. So far, the company has yet to reveal specifics on the sales of its HUAWEI Watch products.

Zhijun’s comments mirror those of many analysts and smartphone company executives, who are still wondering when, or even if, smartwatches will catch on with the general public. Today’s statements from the CEO of HUAWEI show that the industry is still trying to figure that puzzle out, and that could be bad news for Google’s efforts to sell products with the new Android Wear 2.0 OS. Hopefully, we will see a company make that leap soon and create a smartwatch that breaks that barrier and becomes a big mainstream consumer hit.