LG and SM's home fitness JV Fitness Candy dissolved after two years of losses

A joint venture selling subscription home-training services through an app that pulled exercise data from smart bands, cameras and machines.

LG's IT capabilities plus SM's music, dance and artists could beat dedicated home fitness apps with a subscription service across smartphones, smart TVs and wearables.

LG Electronics (51%) and SM Entertainment set up Fitness Candy in June 2022 to grab a foothold in the home fitness market surging during Covid-19, with ambitions to take the LG-plus-SM formula overseas.

The app launch slipped as the venture's C-suite was repeatedly shuffled. Its health care app Init, which rewarded users for clearing exercise missions, only launched in July 2023 — by which time the pandemic home fitness boom was retracting. Net losses grew from ₩3.29B in 2022 to ₩5.67B in 2023.

At a shareholders' meeting on 15 April 2024 the venture voted to dissolve and begin liquidation, two years after founding.

Both parents bet on a Covid demand spike that reversed before the product shipped.

Executive churn at the JV delayed the launch by a full year, missing the market window.

Rewarding exercise missions was not enough differentiation once dedicated fitness apps and the post-pandemic slump set in.

With losses widening each year and no breakthrough, both parents chose a clean liquidation over another pivot.

A pandemic boom is a deadline, not a runway: if management churn delays your launch past the demand spike, the partnership has nothing left to sell into.

As of 18 April 2024 Fitness Candy was in liquidation. LG and SM had earlier signalled the ambition to export the model overseas; that never materialised.