46.6% Chinese Users Willing to Purchase Smartwatches: Baidu Report

Wearable devices have become the most anticipated digital products after smartphone and tablets, although there is still a long way for manufacturers to commercialize them. This anticipation is demonstrated in a report recently released by Baidu with 93.1% of the interviewees is familiarized with this concept and 70% to 75% are willing to purchase one (report in Chinese).

Giving no consideration to prices, 49.3% and 46.6% of the customers may purchase smart bracelets and smartwatches, two main categories of wearable devices, respectively, while 19.5% and 29.1% will definitely purchase one.

According to the report, 48.1% of the users hope wearable devices can help them to keep fit and 37% to overcome laziness and implement sports plans.

Wearable Device Functions Favored by Customers

The report adds that users are interested in features such as body-sensing interactions and cross-platform cloud data. Custoemers look forward to more apps dedicated to wearable divides, rather than apps already available on smartphone.

Wearable devices already released by domestic manufacturers are Shanda’s Geak Watch, Qihoo’s 360 Child Guard, T-Watch, inWatch, CWatch, among others. Future wearable device market has abundant manufactures but in lack of a platform, like Android and iOS for smartphones, which enables all related wearable devices to operate and store data on it.

Research institution iiMedia predicted that the market size of Chinese wearable devices would reach 11.49 billion yuan ($1.87 billion) and the shipment would amount to 40 million sets by 2015 (source in Chinese). Wearable device  mania swept the whole world, an Australian research institute predicted that one fifth of Austrlians would have one wearable device each in the future year, with shipment reaching 36 million sets (source in Chinese).

image credit: Baidu