A report with Reuters suggests that Fitbit is up for sale. The company has hired an investment bank to explore options. One option is to sell out to Alphabet (Google).
Fitbit has recently been making some good corporate partnerships to ship its devices and services but I suspect is finding selling its watches to the general public increasingly more difficult.
The FITBIT platform has always been pretty good. It’s just that the latest devices are not that much better than much cheaper ‘Chinese’ devices at the lower end of the market. With the falling retail price of old-model Apple Watches in the mid-market and the premium/’luxury’ watches, like Garmin, at the upper price brackets, Fitbit has nowhere to go.
Well, it has somewhere to go … it’s just moving there at a snail’s pace. That’s simply not good enough, as I have alluded to before here on several occasions.
I suspect that they know the game is up, although it’s been fairly obvious since the launch of the Fitbit Ionic. Somebody could buy their platform, somebody could buy some of their patents and employees.
Fitbit shares rose on the news.