Adidas has a nice business going in wearable sports tech with its miCoach line, and just expanded its reach by buying Runtastic for $239 million. Runtastic sells a line of smart bands, smart monitors and scales — some of which overlap Adidas’s existing products. The real value is probably Runtastic’s 70 million registered users.
The Adidas deal is the latest rollup of software/app companies into larger sports companies. In April, UnderArmour bought MapMyFitness and Endomondo, adding 100 million users for $560 million, adding to the 20 million users of MapMyFitness it bought in November 2013 for $150 million. UnderArmour paid between $4 and $7.50 per user; Adidas got Runtastic for $3.40/user. That doesn’t necessarily mean Adidas got a bargain; there’s no way of knowing how many of which users purchase premium services.
If you believe in rooting for the home team, this deal was not unlikely. Adidas is a German company; Runtastic is based in Austria. Runtastic, for those of you keeping track, was 50.1 percent-owned by the German media conglomerate Axel Springer, which was pretty interesting right there. It will become a wholly owned part of Adidas.
Nike, you’ll recall, has pretty much pulled out of the wearable tech business, to the extent that anyone can tell.