The technology company Huawei opened a research and development laboratory in southern China to promote its sports and health devices as an alternative source of income to smartphones, where it has lost ground due to its problems with the US authorities.
The 4,680 square meter laboratory is focused on research in these fields and its facilities house 80 experiments for researchers to develop new smart products for practicing sports or monitoring health.
TECHNOLOGY APPLIED TO SPORTS. The facilities, to which EFE had access and in which the Chinese company has invested 200 million yuan (31 million dollars, 27 million euros), include rooms such as a laboratory capable of recreating the conditions of an environment located 6,000 meters high to measure the effects of oxygen saturation on the human body.
The badminton and basketball court is equipped with 28 high-speed infrared cameras to capture the movements of athletes “to the millimeter” and thus develop “new functions” for its wearable products, company sources said.
Likewise, there are similar facilities in the center to detect and study the movements of practitioners of sports such as swimming, climbing or golf and activities such as yoga or tai chi.
A NEW SITUATION. The inauguration of the center took place in the fall of 2021, a difficult year for the Chinese company in which its turnover fell by 29% year-on-year, mainly due to the effects of US sanctions, which Washington justified in alleged ties with the Chinese army.
As a consequence, the firm lost access to components and technology developed in the North American country, whose market it also had to abandon.
Previously, Huawei had become the world’s largest smartphone seller for the first time in the second quarter of 2020.
According to Chinese and international media, the company has a reserve of an unknown number of chips purchased before the sanctions to build telecommunications infrastructure, one of its main businesses, or to keep its production of new smartphone models alive in the hope of that, in the future, the sanctions be lifted or find a new way to get chips.
However, because it depends on its ‘stock’, it cannot produce phones at the same scale as it did before the sanctions, a problem that it does not have in other products such as smart watches or bracelets, which need less sophisticated microchips available in China. and not subject to blockades.
In fact, the company’s rotating president, Guo Ping, acknowledged in October a “significant impact” on Huawei’s consumer-oriented business, but promised to maintain “commitment” to innovation or research and development activities, which are applied in the new laboratory to a sector in growing demand.
AN OPPORTUNITY IN A GROWING SECTOR. Shipments of wearable devices grew in the third quarter of 2021 by 9.9% to reach 138.4 million worldwide, according to the consultancy IDC, and bracelets, the products most associated with health and sports, they accounted for 34.7% of the market.
The covid-19 pandemic, according to the consultant, has increased interest in products such as bracelets with sports and health applications, although, he assured, these were not unrelated to problems in supply chains in the third quarter of 2021 .
In a quarter marked by these supply problems, Xiaomi, which had recently positioned itself as a leader in the wristband sector, was overtaken by Huawei and Apple, which took the largest market shares in that quarter, according to IDC.
Huawei hopes to get a piece of the cake that is the physical exercise sector in China, which generates a turnover of 7,100 million dollars (6,292 million euros) each year, according to the Chinese consultancy Daxue.
Not surprisingly, the Asian country has experienced a fever for sport in recent years: the number of gyms has skyrocketed from 500 in 2001 to almost 50,000 at the end of 2019, and it is estimated that some 68 million Chinese , 4.9% of the population, go to these premises.
Despite its rapid growth, the proportion of users of “fitness” services in the country is still very far from that in Western countries such as the United States, where it reaches 20%, which, according to Daxue, “represents a huge Market opportunity”.
