Huami Corporation ("Huami" or the "Company") (NYSE: HMI), a biometric and activity data-driven company with significant expertise in smart wearable technology, today announced that, Wang Huang, the Company's Chairman and CEO, issued the following open letter to Huami staff titled "Marching into the next decade: establishing a global health ecosystem; and be the most trusted partner of our users" on December 30, 2019.
Dear Fellow Huamians:
Just a couple more days, we will be marching into the third decade of this century. Standing before the threshold of the new decade, we need to consider our company's past, present and future. We also need to consider our company's growth strategy and challenges, our industry's potential changes, and the meaning of everything we do moving forward.
In the second half of this year over the course of three months, together with the participation and support of over 500 Huami colleagues, we finally decided to upgrade the mission of our company to be: "Connect Health with Technology". We also decided our company's vision to be: "Establish a global health ecosystem; and be the most trusted partner of our users". Here, I would like to share with you some of my thoughts that went into this process.
At the end of 2018, I had a deep discussion with our senior executive team about this question: 'What is the key user value proposition of the smart wearables industry?'. For example, WeChat became successful because it was able to create significant value to users for the mobile Internet. We pondered on this question for about a year, considered many aspects; and we eventually concluded the answer should be "Health".
Actually, health is not only the key user value proposition of smart wearables, it is also one of the key user value propositions of the IoT (Internet of Things) era. The next decade will still be an era of people-centric technology development.
Smart wearables are the "closest" consumer electronic device to human; since it is worn by people. Compared with smartphones, smart wearables can provide many new features, empower new usage scenarios and other advantages due to the closeness of the device's physical distance to the human body. Smart wearables can continuously monitor human biometrics 24/7. It can be the essential component of sports equipment. It can be a key tool in children's social interaction and security. It can be used for public transportation payment or secured door access. It can be used to control smart home appliances; and it can be used as an AI speech assistant that is attached to your body.
As can be seen above, smart wearables can deliver many user value propositions, including but not limited to: health, sports, mobile payment, entry points to IoT and controlling of smart home appliances, AI assistant, security and even social interaction.
All these user value propositions caused much enticement and excitement for me and our key management team over the past few years. We thought about how can we deliver all these and even many more features to our users based on smart wearables. However, one day, I suddenly wondered: "Can we really deliver all of these features on our own? Shouldn't this be the effort of the entire industry by working together?"
My conclusion is: Yes. Let's stop dwelling on the "winner-take-all" fantasy. We should open up our smart wearable devices platform, connect and collaborate with more partners to deliver more values to our users together. For us, we should just focus on health.
After thinking through this, I suddenly felt a sigh of relief. This is because everyone I see around can all be friends, and not be enemies. It is also because we do not need to spend resources to cover everything. But rather, we can release much more resources to focus deeply on the health vertical. We can finally use "health" as the core logic to clearly drive our business forward. Based on this logic, all of us can clearly understand why we work on some devices and not the others. With this focus, we will not be enticed to do many other things due to our strong hardware development capabilities; and we can effectively control our tendency to do everything just because we feel we can.
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