Under Armour Rides High With Big-Ticket Fitness App Acquisitions
The sports company has purchased MyFitnessPal and Endomondo for $560 million.
By Nina Zipkin •
Athletic performance gear brand Under Armour has some big-time aspirations -- it wants to build "the world's largest digital health and fitness community." It has taken two steps toward that goal this week with the acquisitions of popular activity-tracking apps MyFitnessPal for $475 million and Endomondo for $85 million.
Both companies will keep their names and will continue to operate as usual. The San Francisco-based MyFitnessPal has more than 80 million registered users and was founded in 2005. Endomondo is based out of Copenhagen. It has a predominantly European user base that has grown to roughly 20 million people since its launch in 2007.
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The combined $560 million purchase should allow Under Armour to reach "over 120 million unique global consumers," the company said in a release about its fourth quarter financial results (Under Armour reported $895 million in revenue, up 31 percent from this time last year).
With the new deal, Mike Lee, MyFitnessPal's co-founder and CEO, assured his users that "our products, services and team will remain the same. MyFitnessPal will still be free to use, you own your data and Under Armour will never sell it to any third parties."
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Endomondo CEO and co-founder Mette Lykke explained in her company blog post that "we strongly believe our new partnerships will enable us to speed up our growth and deliver a more engaging and motivating user experience, at a rate we could only dream of before this."
The move follows the roll out of Under Armour's health tracking UA Record at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. With UA Record, users are able to sync all of their different fitness apps into one dashboard to follow their progress, as well as connect and challenge other app users. In 2013, Under Armour bought MapMyFitness and unveiled an open developer platform called Under Armour Connected Fitness.
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