Under Armour's connected fitness apps now have 140 million users

By Aditi Pai
05:16 am
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Under Armour RecordIn the company’s second quarter earnings call, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank told investors that Under Armour is the ideal company to create a connected health dashboard for consumers.

“The fact that consumers have no barometer for their health today is a mistake and frankly that’s where we see this massive opportunity and we feel we’re the best ones to take advantage of it,” Plank said. “Really because of the acquisitions that we’ve made over the last two years…The sheer size and scale of the community that we’ve made — it marks us as a clear leader by a factor of as much as four, three, or at least two times.”

Plank shared several stats about the fitness community Under Armour has built through the development of its app, UA Record, and acquisition of Endomondo, MapMyFitness, and MyFitnessPal.

“We remain in the early stages of uncovering the potential of what the world’s largest digital health and fitness community — with now over 140 million athletes — can do to help us build consumer engagement and drive healthier lifestyles,” Plank said. “We are growing our community at more than 30 percent year over year and so far in 2015 these users have voluntarily logged over 1 billion workouts and more than 5 billion foods.”

Since the beginning of the year, Plank added that more than 1 billion workouts were logged into one of Under Armour’s four apps. He also said that the company continues to add more than 100K unique registered users to the platform every day. Plank explained that the expansion of the connected fitness platform is critical to the company’s continued growth. 

“We believe the brand equity that can provide us in immeasurable,” he said. “Ultimately, the more people exercise, the more athletic footwear and apparel they will buy.”

The dashboard Under Armour is building, within UA Record, will focus on four key metrics: sleep, fitness, daily activity, and nutrition.

“We think the consumer needs a dashboard that just says ‘How am I doing?’,” Plank said. “If I can look on my cellphone and I can figure out my bank balance, my stock price, or the weather in any given city — the fact that I have no measure or barometer of my health except for going to see a doctor ever 12, 1,8 or 24 months, we think is really a crime.”

Another element to the health dashboard that they are focusing on is defining success for the consumer and providing the user with context.

“This isn’t just about knowing that I took 8,000 steps yesterday,” Plank said. “But because I took 8,000 steps, how did it make me feel? And more importantly, how did that work with how I slept or what I ate that day? And we think that having that information is going to allow them to make better decision to live healthier and enriched lives — affecting ultimately, obviously, fitness, but we think there’s an outlook for us to affect global health, which gets us so excited.”

One digital health startup Under Armour acquired but didn’t mention on the earnings call was Gritness, which MobiHealthNews reported on first earlier this month. While Under Armour acquired MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, and Endomondo for their large user base and well-known brands, Gritness is a relative newcomer. It was founded in 2012 and had raised only about $300,000 in seed funding before the deal. The Gritness app is essentially a search engine that helps people find and join workouts. Through the app or website, users can search for workouts or find friends that have similar fitness interests. Businesses can also use Gritness to make their available fitness programs more visible.

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