The CEO of Swatch, one of the world's largest watch makers, says his company will release a "revolutionary battery" next year, "not only for watches, but also for automobiles."
The comments come from extracts of an interview with CEO Nick Hayek in the Swiss weekly Handelszeitung. Reuters confirmed Hayek's statements with a Swatch spokesperson.
In the interview, Hayek is asked—somewhat unsurprisingly—about the Apple Watch, and whether it's a threat to the Swiss watch industry (TAG Heuer, Omega, Rolex, and many of the other watch giants are all headquartered in Switzerland). Hayek seems fairly unfazed by smartwatches, saying that the move towards mobile computing is a good thing for watchmakers, because the more that people are on the move, the more likely they are to want to wear and use a watch. It's "an opportunity for us" to sell more watches he told Handelszeitung.
Swatch isn't going to stick to just mechanical watches, though; in March, the company announced that it would introduce new watches with NFC (for contactless payments) and Bluetooth (to display notifications from your smartphone). The first of those watches, the Touch Zero One (pictured above), is meant to arrive later this month and cost $160 (~£100), but presumably some other smarter Swatch watches are on the way too.