Legend Capital eyes wearable device market with tech investment

November 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Legend Capital eyes wearable device market with tech investment

Staff Reporter

2013-11-05

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An ad for the GolfSense sensor and app developed by Zepp Labs. (Internet Photo)

Many investors are now eyeing wearable devices as the next potential field in consumer electronics, with companies looking to invest in related start-up firms, reports the Chinese Entrepreneur magazine. The concept of wearable devices emerged last year, with the introduction of Google Glass — an eyeglass-shaped mobile computing device, the magazine said. Da Mi, vice president of Legend Capital, a subsidiary of Chinese investment holdings company Legend Holdings, said the most applicable hardware remains the smartphone at this time, but the future lays in sensor hardware. Earlier this year, Legend Capital decided to invest in Zepp Labs — which combines 3D motion technology and sports — and entered its board, after seeing the latter’s hot sales in North America.The investor said he was disappointed, however, after paying a visit to the US headquarters of Zepp Labs, as the tech company has only one employee in the US, its CEO Jason Fass.

Zepp Labs has successfully developed a number of motion-sensing products in the past couple of years and is registered in both China and the US, with the China operations running the company’s research and development with more than 20 engineers.

As a venture capital firm, Legend invests a lot in early-stage start-up companies, and faced with limited financial data of the investment targets, focuses on companies’ management teams, paying close attention to the capability and quality of the core management, Da said.

Zepp was initially founded by Han Zheng, a former PhD student researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. In Oct. 2010, Han and his team developed the first prototype for the GolfSense sensor and app, which immediately won attention from Apple, whose executives urged Han to sell the product via the Apple. In April last year, GolfSense began sales in Apple stores for US$129.99.

After the introduction of GolfSense, Zepp then needed a product manager to handle the US sales — its most important target market. Han employed Fass to take over the CEO position, while Han became chief technology officer.

Insiders said that wearable devices will be a popular investment in the near future. Figures showed that wearable devices in China had a combined sales scale of 420 million yuan (US$68.9 million) last year, which is expected to exceed one billion yuan (US$164 million) in 2015, and nearly five billion yuan (US$819.8 million) in 2017, with an annual compound growth of 60%, the magazine said.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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