Samsung in July released the Galaxy Ring, the South Korean tech giant’s first foray into smart rings.
The $399.99 device has sensors that can track various health metrics like sleep quality, linking up with Samsung’s smartphones and smartwatch.
Along with its S24 series of smartphones, foldable devices, smartwatches and now the Galaxy Ring, Samsung is hoping to lock users into its world of products held together with its suite of artificial intelligence features, known as Galaxy AI.
I was at the high-profile Samsung Galaxy Unpacked launch that took place this month in Paris, France, where the company keen to stress that “Galaxy AI is here”. Samsung spoke at length about how the devices all link together.
Analysts aren’t expecting the Galaxy Ring to sell in huge volumes, though they say the device could be important.
In the latest episode of CNBC Tech’s “Beyond the Valley” podcast — which you can listen to above — Tom Chitty and I are joined by Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, to discuss how Samsung is positioning itself for the future with the Galaxy Ring and its other products.
If you have any thoughts on this or previous episodes, please email us at beyondthevalley@cnbc.com.
You can subscribe to “Beyond the Valley” by clicking the links below to your chosen platform:
Apple Podcast
Google Podcasts
Spotify
Here is a transcript of the “Beyond the Valley” episode released on July 30, 2024. It has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Tom Chitty
One ring to rule them all is what Samsung are hoping with the launch of their Galaxy Ring, a wearable device that’s able to track various health metrics, such as heart rate and sleep. The South Korean tech giant is looking to integrate its smartphones and wearables and offer health tracking features to rival Apple’s push into the space. Along with Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, battery-powered contact lenses and the inevitable rollout of AI features, can wearable tech revitalize a stagnating tech consumer market? This week, we are joined by a very special guest. So, before Arjun chimes in with something, I’ll introduce our special guest — he is chief analyst at CCS Insight, a research company that, in their words, focuses on the connected world and the future of technology. He has 25 years experience in the mobile sector. Ben Wood, thank you for joining Beyond the Valley.
Ben Wood
Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.
Tom Chitty
I’ve also read about the mobile museum. You are the founder and co-creator of the Mobile Phone Museum. Tell us how did that start? And when did it start?
Ben Wood
Well, I think this shows my love and kind of how much technology and mobile technology [have] been part of my life. I stumbled into the tech industry in the mid 1990s. That was a point where mobile phones were just things that you held to your ear and you talked into. And I went on that journey of launching things like text messaging, connectivity to the internet. And I was surrounded by all these devices. And there was a period from the mid 1980s through to essentially the arrival of the smartphone where there was incredible device diversity in terms of design and capability. And I started picking up the odd kind of icons from the industry. And you know what it’s like when you start collecting stuff, you know, if you collect fridge magnets, people come to your house and say, ‘hey, I’ve got some of those in the drawer at home, I’ll bring you one next time.’ And slowly but surely, you know, 10 phones became 100 phones became 1000 phones became, now if you go to mobilephonemuseum.com, you’ll see we’ve got nearly 3000 unique devices catalogued, photographed, written up.
Tom Chitty
Before we get back to our main story, we play stat of the week, which I know you’re now aware of. Arjun, do you want to give us the stat?
Arjun Kharpal
33.53 trillion Korean won.
Tom Chitty
Okay, brilliant. Ben, let’s start, as you very beautifully introed into the subject at hand. Wearables and, specifically, the Galaxy Ring. Tell us about this ring. For our listeners, should we be excited?
Ben Wood
I think there’s a reason to get excited about the intersection of health and tech, generally speaking. As a society, we have an imperative that we need to try and make everybody more aware of their own personal health. And we want to find ways to track that. And we’ve been given a number of tools to do that. And you know, historically, there [are] some very basic things like step counters, you can have almost like a clockwork step counter back in the day. But that’s evolved. It’s moved into the smartwatch, which has become the kind of powerhouse of devices, there’ll be [a] quarter of a billion smartwatches sold next year. That’s an incredible kind of number. And then you look at miniaturizing that technology and trying to have consistent data on people’s personal performance, and the ring is a great way to do it. It’s small, it’s got good battery life, it’s a very commonly accepted way of wearing something, you know, it’s less intrusive than, say, a pair of smart glasses that can be a bit of a kind of lightning conductor for privacy concerns and those sorts of things. It’s easy to sleep in, and gaining metrics around your health when you’re asleep is a great place to do it. So there’s a lot to like about it. But I don’t want to overhype it — this is a niche opportunity. Right now we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of units for Samsung, potentially with the remainder of this year, not millions or tens of millions.
Arjun Kharpal
But it’s an incredible, I guess, piece of technology because it’s packed with sensors, it’s so light, it’s got a battery life the company claims [to last] for up to seven days as well. And so, it’s useful in that respect, because it’s got the technology inside it to be able to track the things you want, but also the battery life that goes with it. Just tell us a bit about the engineering side of this and bringing such a product to market, it’s not the first company to do so. I know you’ve spoken about companies like Oura before, but it’s clearly got the Samsung brand with it. And that big ecosystem and marketing push behind it as well.
Ben Wood
So for the benefit of the listeners, the first thing to note is that this is not new. There’s a company Oura, you’ve mentioned, which came out of Finland, they’ve been going for, I think about 12 years, they launched their first ring nine years ago. They’re on their third generation of [the] ring, they’ve sold a cumulative total of over 2.5 million to date. So they are the kind of genesis of the smart ring, to some extent. But of course you cannot underestimate a company, a massive consumer electronics business like Samsung, coming into the space. The oxygen that will give it is phenomenal. Obviously, it’s a fantastic day for Oura, you know, a small company who could never have dreamed of getting this kind of visibility amongst consumers. In terms of the technology, what you’re doing is taking the sensor array, which, if you have a smartwatch — you know from Apple, or Samsung, or whoever, Garmin — if you look at the back of that watch, you will see there are sensors in that watch, which are looking at things like your pulse, your blood flow, and measuring all sorts of things. There’s a whole array of things in that sensor. And what Samsung have managed to do, and [what] Oura and others have managed to do, is just miniaturize that technology. And within the inside of the ring, there’s a little array of these tiny little sensors that sit on the inside of your finger and are able to make those measurements. And there’s some very logical reasons to use a ring because of the fact that the skin on the inside of your finger is relatively thin, there’s not going be any hair there, there’s not going be any tan or anything else like that. It’s kind of pretty much directly connected to your heart down [to] your arm. So it’s a good place to do it. And I think that, overall, as I said before, a very commonly accepted place to wear something.
Tom Chitty
Just when it comes to the health tech side of things, there has been some concerns that we maybe look at these things too much, and that [we are],you know, overanalyzing how our sleep has been. And you may wake up and feel great, and then you’re told that actually you had a really bad night’s sleep, and it was really disrupted. As someone who uses and wears these things, and [who] clearly is a supporter of more health tech or being aware of our health, is that a concern?
Ben Wood
Well, the phenomenon you’re describing is what’s known as the worried well, which is typically, you know, people who do obsess over this stuff, and I always caution people, anyone particularly looking at sleep, I think you’re right: be very, very careful, because once you start kind of obsessing about your sleep, that can be a bad thing. But make no mistake, sleep is as important as exercise. And anything you look at around sleep is an absolutely critical part of your overall health. You can obsess, people do, it’s a real problem for the health profession as well, there is this group of people who will be constantly looking at the stats and running in to see their doctor. But, on balance, from my perspective, it is super, super positive, if anybody is taking an interest in their health. And, you know, the overall balance that we’re starting to see, particularly from the smart rings, where they’re not necessarily expecting you to be an expert on all these different metrics, but they’re mashing them up together. And on the Oura ring, you get something known as a readiness score, on the Samsung ring, you get an energy score — they’re actually giving you a single metric that you can look at, and then pointers, maybe little pointers [such as], you know, you should have gone to bed a little bit earlier, you could do with doing a little bit more exercise, being a bit more active, don’t sit so much. All of those things will help your overall health.
Arjun Kharpal
One of the things Samsung said was look, the ring is one product, but we’ve got the watch, we’ve got the smartphone. And when you link all three together, we feel that we can give you more powerful metrics, more powerful understanding of your health as well. So that’s one part. And then the second part is that Galaxy AI, Samsung’s term for its suite of AI products, is going to link this all together. And it’s all going to be about the fact that AI can analyze this data and not just tell you what’s happening, but as you mentioned, [it can] do things like perhaps give you tips. And this is, you know, what I’m hearing, what you’re hearing as well from Samsung executives when they’re talking about the whole health landscape. So when you when you look at all of that, how detailed are we going to get, do you think, when it comes to the health information we’re going to glean, the way that the smartphone becomes a personal coach? Is that the goal?
Ben Wood
Firstly, this idea, this concept that Samsung love of this ecosystem of products, you know, you’ve got your ring, you’ve got your watch, you’ve got your phone, personally, at the most basic level, you don’t need all of those things necessarily. If you’ve got a ring, you don’t necessarily need a watch. But if you’ve got them both, the watch can present stuff to you in a different way, [it] effectively takes over from the ring — so the ring gets longer battery life, because the watch is doing some of the legwork. You need the phone, because the phone is basically what connects to the ring. For example, the ring is a very basic device, it’s just a piece of titanium, which has got baked into it some sensors, a battery, and a little bit of RF to send a Bluetooth message to say, here’s the data, it drops onto the phone, the phone absorbs that data, it can do some calculations and some interpretation on the phone, it can even go up to the cloud and actually do, you know, further computation. So that’s how these things [are] linked together. But make no mistake, there is a commercial driver for Samsung here, in the same way that, if someone’s got an iPhone, an Apple Watch, they probably [aren’t] ever going to leave to go to another ecosystem. If you get into the Samsung ecosystem, and you’ve got the phone, but then you get a watch or you get a ring or whatever you are more invested in the ecosystem. In terms of what we do with all of this data, AI is a very powerful mechanism of easily taking that data and crunching it all together and being able to give you some of those indicators or pointers that you talked about. And I think that’s a very valuable place that we’re at, right now. But on the macro scale, and if you think about my comments earlier in terms of the societal imperative to find a way to improve health, and, particularly, [to] do a lot more predictive and preventative health. It’s no good waiting till something happens. We can use this data to start doing that. And we’ve seen some incredible studies, crowdsourcing data, anonymized data from wearable devices. Apple, for example, have been very passionate about this with Apple Watch, and medical science being able to do research and look at huge datasets that they could never do before. So that that’s very exciting. The anecdotes on predictive and preventative health. This is an extreme example, but it goes down well, when I’m talking about these things. I always say that I’d much rather live in a world where I’m walking down the street, and an ambulance pulls up next to me and says ‘You’d better get in,’ versus the world [in which] I have a heart attack on a dirty London sidewalk, and I’m lying there with some young person livestreaming it out waiting two and a half hours for an ambulance, and I’m progressively getting worse. Now, that’s not the real scenario, the real scenario is you would hear from your [General Practitioner], or from your doctor and say, ‘you know what we’re seeing some things we’re a little bit concerned about.’ And I see a world where eventually, we might even have, like, a digital twin in the cloud, which is looking at us. It knows all about us, you know, height, weight, activity and everything else, and [it] may pick up some markers that could say, ‘Well, maybe you need a bit of help on your diet, maybe you need some help medically, maybe there’s something that’s some kind of intervention that needs to happen.’ And if you look at the pressure on the health services around the world, something has to happen. Hospitals are full. We’re running out of money.
Tom Chitty
You brought in the ring today. And before we started the recording, and you were talking through kind of the various bits that you would have to receive to then get measured up. Talk us through the kind of what you would get, if you were to buy a Galaxy Ring.
Ben Wood
There’s some complexity associated with rings, because of the fact that it’s not like a watch, where you just put it on, and the strap can be adjusted to the size of your wrist. A finger is a very specific measurement. So the journey starts for anybody buying a smart ring to actually have to get their fingers sized. So you need a sizing kit. Typically, there’s up to nine different sizes. So as a consumer, you may have to send off for a sizing kit. Often, what will happen is you’ll get a rebate on that. So you can purchase that through Amazon or another retailer, they’ll send you the sizing kit, you choose your size. And then once you’ve done that, you’ll get your 10 bucks, or whatever it was taken off the cost. So you can size up. So you got a selection of rings there. But let’s think about the complexity here. So, firstly, as a consumer, you’ve got to get sized up. Now some of the ring manufacturers are working with retail partners, or are working with Best Buy in the U.S. Samsung, for example, they’re partnering with numerous retailers here in the U.K., for example. So you’ll be able to go into a store and size up. But the other thing was sizing if your fingers changed through different times of the day.
Arjun Kharpal
Did they say the index finger is best?
Ben Wood
The index finger is good because of the fact that they actually have gestures built into the ring. So you can actually tap your thumb and finger together. And I’ve been using it to take selfies on my phone.
Arjun Kharpal
I completely forgot about that.
Ben Wood
A tap of the index finger and thumb. So anyone who’s been tracking what Apple have been doing with the Vision Pro, for example, very similar user interface. On the Apple Watch, again, hopeless for people listening, but it’s possible to scroll through an Apple Watch with a simple tap. And we’re starting to see gesture based user interfaces. But you’ve got the sizing that will depend on time of day. Some ring manufacturers suggest that you take one of these plastic dummy rings, and you wear it for 24 hours to see what’s comfortable, because fit is very important for the accuracy of the data that you’re going to get. But let’s just think about this in terms of purchase journey. So you’ve got nine different sizes of ring. In the case of Samsung, you’ve got three colors. So you’ve got 27 different skews of this device. Then, you need the charging base, which it comes with. And, of course, one charger is not going to work for all these different sizes. So you’re going to have different sizes of charging for all the different rings. And you start to feel like, wow, this is a tough thing to do. And I think that there are going to be some very interesting lessons learned, particularly in the retailing of these devices. And it’s something we’re looking at, we’re mystery shopping all of these ways in which people are selling these rings.
Arjun Kharpal
Is the journey to purchase a kind of barrier at all in your view to consumers wanting to do it knowing that they’re going to have to order this kit, maybe wear it for a day, maybe that’s not going to work, maybe try another size. Or is it the fact that if you’re going to order the sizing kit, you know what you’re in for, you’re going to buy the ring, and so you’re already sort of sold on it?
Ben Wood
I see this category right now is kind of like tech jewelry, and it’s going to be a trendy, very appealing thing. People who want this ring will find a way to do it. But it’s certainly not an impulse purchase. It’s not like you can just click and say, send me that, unless you happen to know your ring size. Now, should this product category start to become more pervasive, maybe people will start to take a bit more notice of their ring. Most people know how tall they are, what they weigh, what their waist size is, maybe that’s going to be a metric that people will start to take a little bit not more note of.
Arjun Kharpal
And the $399 price tag was one of the things, I think, that sort of was quite surprising in many ways. It’s priced higher than Samsung’s own smartwatch, the Watch7, which again, I mean, just looking at the two products, right? Something that small, versus a whole watch, you think, well, that’s a bit odd. But it’s a premium product, obviously. Is the price a reflection of the technology and R&D Samsung have had to do to bring this to market? Or is it more just reflective of the fact that Samsung is saying this is a premium product, [and] we want it to be as such?
Ben Wood
In all honesty, it’s probably a bit of both. And the cost of this product goes way beyond the physical device itself. And we’ve alluded to that already. This is a complex supply chain challenge that comes with cost. That said, I think Samsung is very determined to maintain this as a premium product. You can usually take prices down, but putting prices up is always tough. So start with premium positioning. It’s very much in line with some of its rivals as well. The interesting thing about the Samsung devices, they are not charging an ongoing subscription to crunch your data and give you access to the app, in contrast, Oura have a monthly subscription that you have to pay. So they would say that’s a differentiator for them. But yeah, these devices do not cost hundreds of dollars to make. And you can go on to a big online retailer, and you can find smart rings, which do some of these things for, you know, 20, 30 bucks. So, you know, right now it’s a premium product. I think that’s the right approach for Samsung, I don’t think they have unrealistic expectations for volumes on this. They see it as a niche additive product, which plays to that kind of ecosystem of products and plays to this focus on health which they’re chasing, Apple are chasing, other manufacturers are chasing
Tom Chitty
How much is it about that, as much as it is to grow the larger ecosystem with smartphones and then integrate their other products?
Ben Wood
It’s another string to Samsung’s bow. Ultimately, they’re already in the smartwatch space, which emerged to be very health centric. Let’s not forget when Apple Watch was launched, it was [a] fashion product. But that hit a kind of brick wall, they pivoted and they moved towards health. And they found that that was a good place to do it. One of the other things, though, that I’m very encouraged about with regards to smart rings, is the fact that there seems to be significantly more focus on women’s health. And that’s something which has been terribly overlooked and neglected in the wearable space. And when you look at these rings, some of the things that they’re looking at are things like cycle tracking, core body temperature, sleep, which is you know, hugely important. If you’re a menopausal woman, that’s a massively important area and a real challenge for you. And I think that that approach to these and the form factor, you know, not some great big macho, chunky smartwatch, but actually something that you can discreetly wear, good battery life, you can wear in bed — I think [that] is an encouraging area. So, from that perspective, I would expect to see Samsung maybe dialing that up a little bit. But I think, overall, it’s just part of them saying we want a nice portfolio of products that will encourage people to take a look at Samsung.
Arjun Kharpal
Apple’s rarely first in a lot of things. But are you surprised they’ve not entered this category, as of yet? We’ve not heard any kind of rumors about it, given I think that their focus on health and given also the fact that Apple is still seen in many parts of the as is quite a fashionable brand. And you’d feel like if there was some sort of Apple ring, it would do pretty good volumes.
Ben Wood
They’ve got to be looking at it. I mean, in the end of the day, to me it feels like a very good fit. Tim Cook has made it very clear that personally he’s very interested in health. He’s evangelized the kind of positive aspects of Apple Watch. Apple is a very much designed first company, I think there could be a certain amount of kind of, you know, cult kind of following of an Apple ring. I think they’d design it nicely. It could fit well, but then, let’s look at the raw numbers. The numbers aren’t that big right now. But the one thing Apple have as well, given this complex purchase journey is they have a phenomenal retail network, and they’re not afraid to do that kind of concierge selling, whether it was (Apple) Watch historically, Vision Pro now where you go in and you have your fitting and everything else. I could see some synergies for a ring for them.
Arjun Kharpal
When they recently launched the Vision Pro here in the U.K., as you allude to that at the store, it was that sort of experience where, you know, each person who’d booked a demo had an Apple employee to escort them to a chair to do this sort of one-on-one demo. You can imagine the Apple store with this sort of jewelry corner, and it’s just, you know, like some high-end jeweler, with all the rings laid out and someone wearing the white gloves to pull out the ring and put it on a little tray and all that.
Tom Chitty
Diamond-encrusted engagement ring.
Ben Wood
I think you’re right though, Arjun, and it does fit well with Apple. But [the] cost of sale is immense. You know, you’re talking about something like Vision Pro, a $3,500 device, that’s a big, high-ticket item. But you could do that, they’ve got the infrastructure to do the sizing, and ultimately, then people would figure it out. But [it’s] exciting. I go back to the fact that it’s exciting to see this intersection of health and technology, and the fact that people are starting to care. The only thing I do worry about is a lot of the people that I see wearing these kinds of technologies, and I think… Garmin watches are the best example of this, you know, it’s usually somebody’s got a Garmin watch running or whatever, you know, the people who’ve got the technology — sometimes you wonder if they need it the least. They’re already fit, they’re already committed to their personal health. I think Apple Watch, to some extent, has succeeded in that area where you see, you see all sorts of different consumers, you know, you sit on the train, you travel around, you see people, all shapes and sizes, wearing watches, that’s positive. If the ring can go in that direction as well, that’d be good, they might need to get some slightly bigger sizes.
Arjun Kharpal
I remember when smartwatches sort of first hit the market, really. And I remember trying a few of them in the first two, three years. I wasn’t really convinced about them, because the capabilities were still limited, and they didn’t really add a lot of value. In all honesty, I haven’t sort of gone back to them yet. But the capabilities have advanced so much. And I think looking at the way the health apps have come on a lot and the capabilities now, there [are] certainly so many big features and good ways to use them. People are sort of learning how to do that. For Samsung, with the ring, with the watch, with this ecosystem play, with the Galaxy AI push as well, what does that ultimately mean for Samsung’s business? Samsung Electronics, when you look at it, if you break down the sort of revenues — they make revenues from selling hardware, some mobile phones and watches, etc. Networking equipment is a small part of that. Chips, memory chips, many listeners may not even know [they are and have] been for a long part the biggest profit driver of the company, not the mobile phones. And so, when you look at Samsung’s business, around mobile, it’s been around hardware. The software side of the equation has been missing for such a long time. Whereas [if] you look at Apple, obviously it owns the hardware, it owns iOS, it owns the services around that it make billions of dollars off services. Samsung hasn’t been able to replicate that, of course, because it relies on Android. But now if they’re saying, well, we think we can have a real good health offering, we think with some of these AI features. Do you think Samsung is seriously looking at ways to monetize this via subscriptions or other kinds of service business model?
Ben Wood
Absolutely, Samsung will be looking at this line of services and saying, how can we monetize it? Would they be able to do that? That’s a far more challenging question. And, of course, there’ll be looking with envy at Apple who have managed to monetize this service set. I always joke, the iPhone is the gift that keeps on giving, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a second hand, third hand one, you’re probably paying Apple something if you download an app, and you pay it, you buy an app, you’re paying Apple some money. If you’re using Apple Pay, you’re paying Apple some money, if you’re using iCloud, you’re paying Apple some money. So there [are] lots of different facets to this. Health could be an interesting one for Samsung, they may reach a point where there’s some premium element that you could add to health, which could involve some training programs and more detailed data. We saw Fitbit, for example, now owned by Google, but going in that direction with their premium service. But ultimately, you know, the original premise of what you were talking about, you know, smart rings are not going to move the needle on Apple’s balance sheet. Ultimately smartphones will, and if you’ve got things that will turn people’s heads to say, yeah, you know, I’m going to get a smart new smartphone, and oh yeah, Samsung, they’ve got that ring thing, I’m quite interested in that. Or you’ve got one and it means it locks you more into the Samsung ecosystem. Well, that’s a win for Samsung.
Arjun Kharpal
And the foldables?
Ben Wood
Foldables are interesting. These are a very interesting category. Now, if we go back to my passion outside of my day job for mobile phones, I’m excited about foldables, because it’s bringing some design diversity back into the smartphone market. And that’s a pointer as to why I think Samsung are doing this. It’s one of the, albeit a relatively small market, 20 million units this year, 30-35 next year. It’s a rounding error, versus the 1.2, 1.4 billion cellphones that will be sold this year. But, ultimately, foldables are an opportunity for Samsung to have a very differentiated offering. They do appeal to a certain part of the marketplace. But they haven’t really lived up to the massive expectations they were back in 2019, when we saw the first one arrive.
Arjun Kharpal
People still talk about the creases in the fold.
Ben Wood
There’s all sorts of facets to foldables. Firstly, you’ve got the device, and there were some teething problems in the early days, where there was a high failure rate. And so that kind of scared consumers. Now we’ve got to a point where the devices are much more robust, but people are still worried about [the question of] is it going to break. People are still worried about why do I actually need it. I think the flip-form factor has been the most popular by volume, so far. But the folding form factor, which essentially gives you a traditional smartphone, and then you open it, and if you’ve got a mini tablet, is becoming more appealing as the engineering keeps going down that curve, and they get thinner and lighter and more robust. So those are all good, but a kind of hidden cost associated with foldables is their residual value. We’re now living in a world where a lot of smartphone purchase is driven by the fact that people are able to trade in their devices and get some money towards their next phone. Foldables, unfortunately, are not holding their value in the same way that the traditional kind of bar phone does. Because, I think, ultimately their longevity is going to be more limited. And there is a concern about, how has it been treated, replacing screens and those sorts of elements on these devices, it’s extremely expensive.
Tom Chitty
I was looking back seven years ago, when I was in MWC, we made a video about the kind of all the smart tech, the new tech that was being released. And we have wireless earbuds, which I mean, amazing. And then there was also a payment ring, amongst other things. Obviously, with the wireless earbuds, you know, hugely mainstream now everyone’s using it, payment rings less so. In your opinion, these items that we’re talking about these the smart rings, the foldable phones, you know, in a few years time, where do you see these ending up? Do you think that they will be something that we’ll go, ‘I can’t believe that two years ago no one wore a smart ring.’
Ben Wood
Well, it’s I mean, it’s interesting, you bring up payment rings because that’s where my kind of smart ring journey started back in 2017. I was using a payment ring, and as someone who just has a great affinity to technology, it was like a magic trick, you could go into a bar, and you just wave your hand in front of the payment machine, and it would pay. But, you know, there is a, there’s a lot of debate at the moment about getting payment into these new smart rings, but there [are] some engineering reasons why that’s very, very difficult. Payment rings were typically [made of] ceramic, because you’ve got a lot of RF radio frequency transmission that needs to go in there for the kind of reader of the card. And I went through tons of payment rings, because I kept breaking them. They’re very fragile. The smart rings that we’re using now, the health centric ones are made of titanium. They’re super, super strong, but they don’t lend themselves to having radio technology in them. Furthermore, the more technology you put into them, the bigger they get, the bigger [the] battery you need. But yeah, that’s the payment ring story. Will we look back in five years and go wow, I can’t believe you know, people weren’t wearing smart rings five years ago? I don’t think it’s going to be as pervasive as that. But I can see a certain proportion of the population embracing the smart ring and actually rejecting the smartwatch because the smartwatch, if we think about this kind of societal desire to maybe digital detox a little bit, you know, take some of those distractions out of your life, the smartwatch is a really bad example of that. If you are enabling things like alerts on your smartwatch, it’s incredibly distracting. A ring could be a way to get those health metrics without those distractions. And that might be one way in which you see these manufacturers pushing the technology.
Arjun Kharpal
As we come towards the end of the episode, Ben what helps make smart rings go a bit more mainstream? Because the capabilities of the current Samsung Galaxy Ring are, as you said earlier, which was effectively taking what’s in the smartwatch and miniaturizing it into a more fashionable, perhaps more comfortable form, one that can be worn 24 hours a day. There’s talk of payments. But there’s other talk in terms of the health aspect that there [are] certain metrics or tracking features that that these tech companies see as the Holy Grail. One of those is things like non-invasive glucose monitoring, which would be a huge breakthrough, if it [were] possible on either a smartwatch or a ring. Is the key for these to really grow in scale and hit the mainstream about their capabilities more than anything?
Ben Wood
I think it’s very various milestones. So the first thing will be number one, Samsung, one of the largest consumer electronics companies on the planet has decided to launch a smart ring. And they’ll put some significant marketing investment behind that. That will take the smart ring from some sort of, you know, geeky tech health enthusiasts segment to the mainstream. A lot more people will learn about this category. The next thing that could really, really kickstart the category would be if Apple made one. And that just is the case with any kind of technology. In terms of the broader adoption of health related tech, you’re absolutely right that the Holy Grail is two things. Non-invasive blood sugar measurement or glucose measurement. And the other thing is blood pressure. Neither of which has been cracked on the smartwatch right now. There’s some rudimentary blood pressure stuff, but it’s not accurate. If those things happened, if Apple could get some kind of sensor into an Apple Watch, which had some kind of ability to look at glucose and you know, assess whether you were pre-diabetic, that could be a societal game changer in the same way that an Apple Watch can tell you if you’ve got atrial fibrillation, you’ll get warned on it. I think if people start getting warnings on their watches that they were pre-diabetic, it might have a societal impact. So I’m excited about that. Will people go out and buy products [on] that basis? Not really, I think people are generally pretty lazy. You know, the final aspect of it is insurance companies and governments. As I said, right at the beginning, health services are overwhelmed. The funding is just not there. It could well be that some of this predictive and preventative health means that you see national governments deploying wearables as a means to try and encourage people to take more interest in their health. And insurance companies may do the same. That comes with challenges, of course, but we’ve already seen insurance companies, aligning with wearables and taking wearables data and saying to people, if you get a certain level of activity, we’ll look at whether we’ll reduce your premium.
Tom Chitty
Before we finish, we’ve got to do stat of the week. What’s your official guess?
Ben Wood
We saw Samsung pre-announcing where they thought their earnings are going to be. It’s a big number.
Arjun Kharpal
So Samsung second-quarter guidance.
Tom Chitty
The amount of money that Samsung has put into developing their smart ring?
Arjun Kharpal
You are nowhere near, Tom. Ben [is] closer but still not correct. Final round of guesses.
Ben wood
Revenue from their smartphone business, something like that.
Arjun Kharpal
Tom, final.
Tom Chitty
The amount of money that they’ve spent on developing smartphones since day one?
Arjun Kharpal
Tom, you’re just completely on the wrong course. Ben basically got it. It was smartphones, mobile and network business revenue in the first quarter, because they’ve not announced their full second-quarter results yet. And that’s been very strong, because of the S24 range they launched in January, which has done very, very well in the high-end segment of the market. And, interestingly, because the memory chip market has been quite bad over the last sort of year or so, Samsung’s memory business has been pretty bad, and the mobile unit has eclipsed it more recently. But we are seeing sort of green shoots of recovery in the memory market, which is why as you allude to that second-quarter guidance they gave was so strong as well.
Ben Wood
It’s a very cyclical market. And the S24 [is] very much anchored on this AI story which we talked about earlier.
Tom Chitty
Brilliant stuff. Thanks so much, Ben, for joining us on Beyond the Valley. Before we go, please follow and subscribe to the show, and you can rate us. Thank you, Ben.
Ben Wood
Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tom Chitty
Thank you, Arjun.
Arjun Kharpal
Thank you, Tom.
Tom Chitty
We’ll be back next week for another episode of Beyond the Valley. Goodbye.
