Xiaomi-backed Huami Acquires Core Assets of Zepp

Huami Corporation, a Xiaomi-backed public company specializing in smart wearable technology, announced on July 26 the purchase of core assets from Zepp International Limited, a leading wearable sports technology company.

Huami is hoping to leverage Zepp’s research and development team and their mature products to gain expertise in the sports analytics arena, while utilizing its developed sales channels and sports equipment manufacturing partnerships to enter into new and premium sports products markets.

ZEPP team.
ZEPP team. Image Source: ZEPP.

Zepp is a multi-sport sensor technology company that utilizes both software and hardware to assist users in improving their sports trainings. Zepp’s products cover popular sports and as pioneer in motion smart hardware design, the company has a number of U.S. and international patents in sensors, algorithms, deep learning and other fields.

Huami is excited about the expanded market and global product development opportunities in the sports training analytics field, said Wang Huang, Chairman and CEO of Huami Corporation.

Huami sport watch
Huami sport watch. Image Source: Huami.

Huami’s recent acquisition of the core assets of another leading fitness wearable and heart rate monitoring company, Physical Enterprises Incorporated (PEI), will also help Huami further develop their sports and fitness market strategy.

Founded in 2013, Huami is a smart wearable devices company that produces self-branded and Xiaomi-branded devices such as the popular Mi bands. It is heavily backed by Xiaomi as Xiaomi and CEO Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital own 19.3 percent and 20.4 percent of Huami respectively. It is also extremely dependent on Xiaomi as Xiaomi-branded devices accounted for 80 percent of Huami’s sales in 2017, according to its prospectus to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

This February, Huami became a public company on the NYSE, but its stock is still trading below its IPO price.