Suunto’s Fully Leaving Finland

DC Rainmaker with the news:

According to an article published this morning by the largest daily newspaper in Finland, Suunto plans to lay off the majority of remaining staff in Finland, and continue consolidating functions in China, via its owners since 2022 – Liesheng.

There it is. A heritage brand gets purchased by international conglomerate, propped up for a few years, then folks at the original home base get shitcanned, and profit! Always the same story.

Before being sold to Liesheng Suunto had been part of Amer Sports since 2019. Amer Sports bills itself as a Finnish multinational sporting equipment division on Wikipedia, but is part owned by Chip Wilson (of Lululemon notoriety, and more importantly Anta Sports (another Chinese multi brand corporation). So it seems that Amer didn’t know what to do with a tech product in their portfolio and sold it to Liesheng, which is a tech company who is using the “heritage brand asset” to prop up their “no name manufacturing” somewhere in China. (You can’t even find a Western accessible website for the organization.) In recent years Suunto, under Liesheng ownership was able to completely revamp their software stack and actually release a few decent iterations of their watches, but still, damn, I hate it.