{"id":514391,"date":"2023-11-09T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T04:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=514391"},"modified":"2023-11-09T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T05:00:00","slug":"fitbit-is-leaving-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/gadgets\/514391-fitbit-is-leaving-south-africa.html","title":{"rendered":"Fitbit is leaving South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google is pulling Fitbit out of South Africa, TechCentral reported<\/a><\/strong>. Its decision comes less than three years after Google completed its acquisition of the fitness tracker company.<\/p>\n

Fitbit wearables have been sold in South Africa since at least 2014.<\/p>\n

Core Group, a company better known for bringing Apple products into South Africa, imported and distributed Fitbit.<\/p>\n

Aside from having a reputation as a more affordable fitness tracker, Fitbit has a storied history and technological heritage.<\/p>\n

It was founded as Healthy Metrics Research, Inc. in March 2007 and changed its name to Fitbit, Inc. that October.<\/p>\n

Fitbit acquired fitness coaching app developer Fitstar for $17.8 million on 5 March 2015.<\/p>\n

It went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 18 June 2015, raising $732 million (around R9 billion at the time).<\/p>\n

In May 2016, Fitbit acquired Coin, keeping its wearable payment platform and binning its smart credit card product.<\/p>\n

This would eventually become Fitbit Pay, which reached South Africa in 2018.<\/p>\n

FNB was the first bank to support the platform on its Visa credit cards. Five other local banks now support Fitbit Pay on their Visa-based payment cards: Absa, Discovery Bank, Investec, Nedbank, and RMB Private Bank.<\/p>\n

Then, on 7 December 2016, Fitbit acquired distressed smartwatch startup Pebble.<\/p>\n

Pebble built affordable, sub-$200 smartwatches, seeing phenomenal early success via crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.<\/p>\n

However, the company ran into trouble early in 2016, retrenching 25% of its workforce \u2014 40 staff.<\/p>\n

Despite running another incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign in May 2016 for three new watches in a last-ditch effort to raise the money it needed to stay afloat, the company ultimately failed<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fitbit picked up Pebble\u2019s software and intellectual property for $23 million, which was reportedly not even enough to cover the company\u2019s debts.<\/p>\n

Pebble\u2019s assets, including product inventory and server equipment, were sold separately.<\/p>\n

After Pebble, Fitbit acquired Romanian smartwatch startup Vector Watch SRL on 10 January 2017.<\/p>\n

Later that year, Fitbit would launch its Ionic smartwatch \u2014 its first built on Pebble\u2019s software platform.<\/p>\n

\"Fitbit<\/a>

Fitbit Ionic<\/p><\/div>\n

On 1 November 2019, Google announced it would buy Fitbit for $2.1 billion cash<\/strong><\/a> \u2014 R31.7 billion at the time.<\/p>\n

Google only completed the transaction in January 2021 following extreme regulatory scrutiny.<\/p>\n

South Africa\u2019s Competition Commission approved the deal<\/a><\/strong> on 22 December 2020 with a lengthy set of conditions attached.<\/p>\n

South Africa joins a host of countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America where Google stopped selling Fitbit<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In Europe, these are Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Slovakia.<\/p>\n

In Asia, Fitbit is no longer being sold in Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.<\/p>\n

Google has also pulled Fitbit out of Mexico and the broader Latin America.<\/p>\n

The company has said it is aligning its hardware portfolio to map closer to its Pixel smartphone\u2019s regional availability.<\/p>\n

Google has never sold its Pixel smartphones in South Africa nor expressed any firm plans to launch them locally.<\/p>\n

This didn\u2019t prevent those who really wanted a Pixel smartphone (or Nexus before that), from importing one. They just wouldn\u2019t receive any local support or warranty on the device.<\/p>\n

Google assured that Fitbit and Nest products already sold in South Africa would continue to function and receive software support from the company.<\/p>\n

It will also honour any warranties on units people already own.<\/p>\n

MyBroadband contacted Google for comment. A spokesperson for the company acknowledged our query but didn\u2019t answer our questions by the time of publication.<\/p>\n

\n

Now read: These searches made Google the most money in one week<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google is pulling Fitbit out of South Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":514393,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[605,1579,25235,167,35,10774,10776],"class_list":["post-514391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gadgets","tag-apple","tag-core-group","tag-fitbit","tag-google","tag-headline","tag-kickstarter","tag-pebble"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":514399,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514391\/revisions\/514399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}