The timing and the content of the announcement showed the strategic thinking of Frederique Constant’s founder Peter Stas and also helped to explain his rationale for selling the Frederique Constant, Alpina and Ateliers de Monaco brands to Japan’s Citizen Group just a couple of months ago. The intellectual property and people behind what is now MMT Swiss Connect were not included in the deal and the company has now been “spun out” and taken its quarters in the “Skylab”, a concentration of Swiss high-tech companies that just happens to be located nextdoor to the Frederique Constant factory in Plan-les-Ouates, on the outskirts of Geneva.
The day before Apple’s latest keynote, where the company revealed the Apple Watch 2, Peter Stas took the opportunity to present this significant change and announce the arrival of two new smartwatch calibres by MMT, the MMT 281, with a smaller diameter specifically designed for ladies’ smartwatches, and the MMT 282 with a new battery offering four years of battery life. Both new calibres incorporate new haptic feedback, with the MMT 281 be in the smallest connected watch calibre on the market and the MMT 282, offering a battery life of up to four years. Both calibres are already in production and will be delivered to Alpina and Frederique Constant and MMT’s other customers (currently Movado and Mondaine) from the end of this month. We can expect new, cheaper, smartwatch offerings from Frederique Constant and Alpina some time in October, therefore, with aggressive prices starting from as low as 695 Swiss francs.
Although Peter Stas included several sideswipes to the giants of Silicon Valley in his presentation, he was also keen to point out that the approach of MMT has two significant differences from that of its US (and Swiss) competitors: “Firstly we offer an unparalleled battery life of four years at a price that remains competitive and will be even cheaper than the first model of our Horological Smartwatch; secondly our movements and modules are interchangeable and can therefore be replaced in the future as and when required.”
But MMT does not merely offer a Swiss Made smartwatch module. The company offers end-to-end solutions comprising firmware, a cloud, manufacturing, service and over-the-air facilities for upgrades. More important, however, is that the company also offers its own apps, which even bear the label “Swiss Made software”. Aside from the standard application that comes with every Horological Smartwatch, the company is poised to present three news apps. To complement the in-built health and fitness tracking functions, users will be able to download a “gym” app within weeks that will offer personalized training and nutrition programmes, fitness goals and community sharing functions. A password manager with secure cloud storage and military-grade encryption will be available from October, priced at $9.95. But the app that may appeal most to watch fans and creates a genuine link between the smartwatch and traditional mechanical watches is called “Analytics”. Available from November, this app will work using a special clip, that can be purchased separately for $89, to measure the accuracy of any mechanical watch and follow its evolution over time.
