Peloton taps Apple suppliers in major production shift

AppleInsider

Peloton is switching gear to try and cut its costs, with a plan to use Apple's suppliers and other external firms to construct its fitness products rather than relying on its own factories.

Peloton has been struggling to keep costs down amid talks of a potential buy-out or investment from a major company like Apple or Amazon. In its latest bid to reduce its outgoings, the firm is apparently turning to companies that work with Apple in assembling products.

Instead of splitting manufacturing between its own facilities and partners, Bloomberg reports it will stop production at facilities acquired in 2019 in favor of relying solely on third-party firms. Work performed by facilities operated by subsidiary Tonic Fitness Technology will instead be solely performed by existing partner Rexon.

"We are going back to nothing but partnered manufacturing," said Peloton chief supply chain officer Andrew Rendich. "It allows us to ramp up and ramp down based on capacity and demand."

Rendich reckoned that having dual supply chains required more resources, and so a simplification to an external-only approach could both cut costs and improve product quality.

Along with going down the same route as Apple for its main manufacturing efforts, Peloton is also working with firms that exist in Apple's supply chain. It already works with Quanta Computer on touch screens for its workout devices, but it's also tapping Pegatron Corp for its rowing machine.

The shift in strategy is the latest move by Peloton to try and improve its standing. After financial woes resulted in reports it was a potential acquisition target, the fitness equipment maker then moved to right the ship.

This included a major shakeup in February involving a new CEO and the laying off of 2,800 employees, and in April, a considerable cutting of prices on hardware at the same time as increasing subscription fees.

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Beats

I see a huge opportunity for Apple that others don’t. It seems everyone thinks if Apple acquired them it would just be a bunch of bikes with low sales.

Here’s a bigger picture:
Apple could use “2nd party”* equipment to market not only to homes but gyms across the globe. GymKit is pretty much dead. Apple equipment can revive it and will be a selling point to get into the Apple eco-system.

*”2nd party” is a term I use to describe a company within a company like Beats to Apple. I don’t think I’d want Peloton to change their name to “Apple”. 

Anyways…
The added content would make it similar to the Beats acquisition. Add Watch and Apple’s OSes support. Done. Now you have twice as much content on your Fitness+ subscription.

I don’t wanna see another Amazon Alexa situation where Apple lost because they didn’t have 1st party products. With Peloton losing value fast, it’s the best time for Apple to swoop in and take them

Edit:
Just looked up GymKit on YouTube to make sure I wasn’t crazy and maybe it was gaining traction somewhere and the first video that showed up was titled “Is the Apple GymKit dead”.

I ran across this comment that further proves Apple needs to get their sh** together here.

sconosciuto

interesting notion but I don't see it happening.

hammeroftruth

Beats said:

I see a huge opportunity for Apple that others don’t. It seems everyone thinks if Apple acquired them it would just be a bunch of bikes with low sales.

Here’s a bigger picture:
Apple could use “2nd party”* equipment to market not only to homes but gyms across the globe. GymKit is pretty much dead. Apple equipment can revive it and will be a selling point to get into the Apple eco-system.

*”2nd party” is a term I use to describe a company within a company like Beats to Apple. I don’t think I’d want Peloton to change their name to “Apple”. 

Anyways…
The added content would make it similar to the Beats acquisition. Add Watch and Apple’s OSes support. Done. Now you have twice as much content on your Fitness+ subscription.

I don’t wanna see another Amazon Alexa situation where Apple lost because they didn’t have 1st party products. With Peloton losing value fast, it’s the best time for Apple to swoop in and take them

Edit:
Just looked up GymKit on YouTube to make sure I wasn’t crazy and maybe it was gaining traction somewhere and the first video that showed up was titled “Is the Apple GymKit dead”.

I ran across this comment that further proves Apple needs to get their sh** together here.

The problem with your comparison is that Beats had something to offer Apple while Peloton doesn’t. Apple wanted it’s own music subscription service and didn’t have the resources to build it from the ground up. 

It wanted Beats for the service, the hardware line was secondary. 

Peloton’s attraction was it’s service during the pandemic shutdown. People were using the service and hardware to relieve the stress of isolation. Now that there isn’t any restrictions to go out and go to the gym, more people prefer that because of the interactions with other gym members. That’s why Peloton is pretty much done, nobody wants to pay the cost of the hardware when they can go to the gym and have the same type of instruction and interact with other people physically rather than virtually.  There is nothing of value from Peloton, that Apple couldn’t reproduce at a lower cost. If Apple fitness takes off, it will remove the only thing of value that Peloton has, the service. 

Beats

hammeroftruth said:

Beats said:

I see a huge opportunity for Apple that others don’t. It seems everyone thinks if Apple acquired them it would just be a bunch of bikes with low sales.

Here’s a bigger picture:
Apple could use “2nd party”* equipment to market not only to homes but gyms across the globe. GymKit is pretty much dead. Apple equipment can revive it and will be a selling point to get into the Apple eco-system.

*”2nd party” is a term I use to describe a company within a company like Beats to Apple. I don’t think I’d want Peloton to change their name to “Apple”. 

Anyways…
The added content would make it similar to the Beats acquisition. Add Watch and Apple’s OSes support. Done. Now you have twice as much content on your Fitness+ subscription.

I don’t wanna see another Amazon Alexa situation where Apple lost because they didn’t have 1st party products. With Peloton losing value fast, it’s the best time for Apple to swoop in and take them

Edit:
Just looked up GymKit on YouTube to make sure I wasn’t crazy and maybe it was gaining traction somewhere and the first video that showed up was titled “Is the Apple GymKit dead”.

I ran across this comment that further proves Apple needs to get their sh** together here.

The problem with your comparison is that Beats had something to offer Apple while Peloton doesn’t. Apple wanted it’s own music subscription service and didn’t have the resources to build it from the ground up. 

It wanted Beats for the service, the hardware line was secondary. 

Peloton’s attraction was it’s service during the pandemic shutdown. People were using the service and hardware to relieve the stress of isolation. Now that there isn’t any restrictions to go out and go to the gym, more people prefer that because of the interactions with other gym members. That’s why Peloton is pretty much done, nobody wants to pay the cost of the hardware when they can go to the gym and have the same type of instruction and interact with other people physically rather than virtually.  There is nothing of value from Peloton, that Apple couldn’t reproduce at a lower cost. If Apple fitness takes off, it will remove the only thing of value that Peloton has, the service. 

The reason I used the word “similar” was because Apple didn’t have a streaming service. Apple has a fitness service already. Of course Peloton has a lot to offer. Adding twice as much or more content and eliminating the closest competitor would be huge. This is more akin to Apple buying Spotify and Beats at the same time but on a smaller scale (unfortunately).

Your 2nd paragraph was already addressed in my post.
Apple automatically having a high-end, high-tech catalog of exercise equipment to ship will help them get into gyms across the world and make GymKit relevant.

Long term, GymKit will widen the Apple halo effect and ecosystem. Imagine coming back from the gym and all your workouts and steps, heart rate etc. are logged in? Even if your iPhone and Watch die, GymKit will still keep count of your treadmill steps.
I never said home use would be first, taking over fitness as a whole is first and most people don’t buy fitness equipment for home use, that’s what the gym is for. 

Again, these are things people aren’t thinking of. People think Apple will just acquire a warehouse of junk no one wants. And again, if Amazon scoops them up we’ll have another Alexa situation where the innovator is losing to the platform that owns the equipment.

entropys

Peleton business model is the key problem. Tying fitness classes to expensive, dedicated hardware.
why buy into that hurt when you could do a different approach?

promotion of GymKit? Why would they need peleton to promote that? They could just much more cheaply provide incentives for mainstream fitness equipment manufacturers. That would create a faster network of GymKit compatible equipment.

Beats

entropys said:

Peleton business model is the key problem. Tying fitness classes to expensive, dedicated hardware.
why buy into that hurt when you could do a different approach?

promotion of GymKit? Why would they need peleton to promote that? They could just much more cheaply provide incentives for mainstream fitness equipment manufacturers. That would create a faster network of GymKit compatible equipment.

Then why doesn’t Apple do that?! Who will they subsidize? Nordic Track plus the gyms? Why didn’t this work for HomeKit where Amazon came and dominated which eventually led to the HomePod’s demise?

The idea of providing incentives to fitness manufacturers sounds good in theory but a lot of gyms (Planet Fitness) are perfectly happy with outdated decades old equipment. Apple could lease machines and upgrade to the latest while arguing why it’s cheaper. (Just a thought).

Back when Peloton was taking over the market I suggested Apple buy Life Fitness or Nordic Track to combat them. They were cheap compared to what Apple has hoarded. Now that Peloton is on hard times I can definitely see a good opportunity to buy.

The problem with other fitness machines is that they’re stuck in 2005. Peloton is a forward thinking company as far as tech goes.

The fact there’s videos about GymKit being dead and users saying GymKit can go F itself should be alarming.

With Peloton, Apple gets a (late) head start on GymKit and 2.3M Fitness+ subscribers. Peloton’s subscription is $44/month. Bet your a** that 2.3M Peloton number will jump 50-500% when it gets swallowed into Fitness+ with MORE content for only $9.99/month. Apple One will also start looking more enticing to people who own Peloton equipment but abandoned the subscription because of cost.

Peloton subscription $44/month

Apple One Premier    $29.99/month
now with Peloton support, hours of new Fitness+ content and 34 new instructors!

If Amazon buys Peloton, there goes another market Apple will exit from.

FileMakerFeller

AppleInsider said:

Instead of splitting manufacturing between its own facilities and partners, Bloomberg reports it will stop production at facilities acquired in 2019 in favor of relying solely on third-party firms. Work performed by facilities operated by subsidiary Tonic Fitness Technology will instead be solely performed by existing partner Rexon.

"We are going back to nothing but partnered manufacturing," said Peloton chief supply chain officer Andrew Rendich. "It allows us to ramp up and ramp down based on capacity and demand."

Rendich reckoned that having dual supply chains required more resources, and so a simplification to an external-only approach could both cut costs and improve product quality. 

If your "in-house" manufacturing is performed by a subsidiary company then you already have "partnered manufacturing" and can scale that up and down as required. And you're always going to need more than one manufacturing partner if you want to reduce your risk, so that final paragraph is nonsense.

This sounds like an excuse for bad management - an inability to ensure quality of production from Tonic.