Garmin: Fitness Revenues up by 9% but **920XT DOWN**

Garmin’s official quarterly figures were released a couple of days ago along with some commentary (my thoughts below):

“Fitness:

“The fitness segment posted revenue growth of 9% in the quarter reflecting strong growth of our Garmin Elevate™ wrist heart rate technology products within our activity tracker and running categories, offset by lower multisport revenues. On a year-over-year basis, gross margin and operating margin declined to 51% and 12%, respectively. The gross margin decline was driven by product mix within the quarter. The operating margin decline reflects the continued investment in advertising and research and development to support our long-term goals in the segment. Our recently launched vívoactive HR and vívofit 3 are shipping and we feel we are well positioned with our 2016 product roadmap.” Source: Garmin

So it looks like Fenix 3 and 920XT sales are slowing off as those product cycles peak. General running-optical seems buoyant and that would tie in with what I know about TomTom Runner 2/Spark sales in specific retail outlets – which are going very well too. People want optical HR despite its problems.

Hopefully May/June will see a significant Garmin Sport announcement before a summer lull. Is that 930XT finally going to hit the shops or maybe just an upgraded 920XT…ie 925XT. either that or a Swim 2 or Edge 820. Of course these things won’t just be introduced because 920XT sales are flagging a bit…they would have been planned months ago but possibly delayed this year for the usual round of bug fixing.