Fitbit Development, a company controlled in Romania by the giant Google, which in the best year since its establishment, in 2020, had more than 250 employees and business of almost 120 million lei, will be dissolved and enter voluntary liquidation, Profit.ro reports.
Fitbit’s research and development center in Romania operated through this legal entity.
“We confirm the information about the dissolution of the legal entity Fitbit Development SRL, but we want to clarify that this action does not in any way impact the continuity of the Fitbit development center taken over by Google. The center continues to exist and has developed over the last 3 years. Google’s presence in Romania – which includes the Fitbit development center – it currently has 400 employees. In Bucharest, Google has a regional technology hub that supports the entire product development cycle (Research, Engineering, Product Management and User Experience), with a major impact in the development of Google’s hardware product ecosystem, including for some of the functionalities of the Pixel and Fitbit devices”, the representatives of Google Romania sent.
Last year, the company’s business decreased by 96%, to 498,084 lei, while the net profit increased by 24%, to 186,866 lei.
Fitbit entered Romania in January 2017, when it paid 15 million dollars to take over the intellectual rights of Vector Watch. Later, Fitbit announced that it opened the company’s largest research and development center in Bucharest.
In 2019, the American giant Google bought Fitbit for about 2.1 billion dollars. In November 2023, however, Google decided to remove Fitbit products from sale in 29 countries, including Romania, the reason being the favoring of the Pixel brand.