LVMH Goes (Also) Smart Watch

Tag Heuer has launched a smartwatch at Baselworld 2015 along with Google and Intel, becoming the latest company to enter the smartwatch space. Google offers the Android Wear platform, in this case powered by Intel, to take on Apple at the high-end of the watch market. About 720,000 watches powered by Android Wear were shipped in 2014, according to market research firm Canalys.

According to Jena-Claude Biver, the president of LVMH Watches Worldwide, in an interview with Reuters at the watch trade show, «Tag Heuer is planning to launch next autumn a smartwatchversion of its Carrera watch that will offer many of the same functions as the Apple watch such as geolocation, distance walked and altitude.» The watch will be a digital replica of the original Tag Heuer black Carrera and look like the original watch.

«People will have the impression that they are wearing a normal watch», Tag Heuer Chief Executive Jean-Claude Biver told Reuters in an interview at Baselworld, the industry’s biggest fair where retailers place their orders for the year. The comments follow a recent interview with Bloomberg where Biver said: «we can’t produce the engine, the chips, the applications, the hardware – nobody can produce it in Switzerland».

«The hardware and the software will come from Silicon Valley. But the watch case, the dial, the design, the idea, the crown, that part of the watch will, of course, be Swiss. We’ll only do it if we can be first, different and unique» , he said in an interview with Reuters at the time, without specifying how much energy or money is being invested on the project.

According to Tag Heuer, the company’s research and development business has been split into two departments to reflect the «different craftsmanship» involved in developing the smartwatch. One department focuses on research and development with watchmakers and watch engineers, the other with engineers of technology. The company also announced a special tie-up with DJ David Guetta.