Philip Houska Fitness tracker specialist Fitbit has agreed to acquire smartwatch startup Pebble, which debuted on Kickstarter four years ago. The amount spent is according to the magazine Bloomberg hovered below the threshold of 40 million dollars (1 billion crowns). From such a deal, Fitbit hopes to integrate Pebble's software elements into its ecosystem and increase sales. They are gradually fading away, just like the entire smartwatch market.
With this acquisition, Fitbit gains not only intellectual property in the form of an operating system, specific applications and cloud services, but also a team of software engineers and testers. The mentioned aspects should become key for the further development of the entire company. However, Fitbit was not interested in the hardware, which means that all smartwatches from the Pebble workshop are ending.
“As mainstream wearables become smarter and health and fitness features are added to smartwatches, we see an opportunity to build on our strengths and expand our leadership position in the wearables market. With this acquisition, we are well-positioned to expand our platform and entire ecosystem to make Fitbit a regular part of the lives of a wider group of customers," said James Park, chief executive officer and co-founder of Fitbit.
However, no Pebble-branded products will be distributed. From the Pebble 2, Time 2 and Core models presented this year has started to be sent to contributors on Kickstarter so far only the first mentioned. Time 2 and Core projects will now be canceled and customers refunded.
Fitbit sees the acquisition of Pebble as an opportunity to be even stronger in the competitive battle in the wearables market, where sales in the third quarter of this year fell by 52 percent year-on-year, according to IDC. In terms of market share and the number of devices sold, Fitbit is still in the lead, but it is acutely aware of the situation, and the purchase of Pebble shows that it is aware of its weaknesses. After all, Fitbit's management lowered its sales forecast for the traditionally very strong Christmas quarter.
Tim Cook: Our data shows that the Apple Watch is doing well. The first holiday week was the best ever, we are expecting the strongest quarter ever. https://t.co/w58D4Vxb2y
— Jablíčkář.cz (@Jablickar) December 6, 2016
According to the already mentioned IDC data, all players on the market are experiencing worse results. Apple Watch saw a more than 70% year-over-year drop in sales in the third quarter, but on closer inspection, that's not so surprising. Many customers have been expecting a new generation of Apple watches during these months, and its sales are good according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. The first week of the new quarter is said to have been the best ever for Watch, and the Californian firm expects this holiday season to bring record sales of watches.
Damn it, I had the Time2 in mind as the only potentially usable "smart" watch :-/ So now all that's left to do is wait for Apple to improve its joke that can't stand anything...
Well, technically he didn't buy it, he just "tunneled it" :)
They only bought the plant, not Pebble.
That's not much to be surprised about. The cheap Pebbles looked terrible and the more expensive ones with a price of around 7k attacked the price of aw s1 or android competitors. Compared to this watch, even the more expensive Pebbles did not look good (thanks to the clumsy display) and were significantly behind in terms of functionality. The only advantage remained the long battery life. Original. pebbles were successful because there was nothing like it at the time and so a lot of geeks bought it. Today, many of these customers have moved to aw or android wear.