The young Swedish WeSports group has engaged in a big shopping spree, taking over many companies in the last few months. It has also announced that Johan Ryding has joined the company’s board of directors. Ryding is one of the founders of Sportamore, the first Nordic online sports store, and he served as its CEO from 2009 until 2020, when Sportamore was acquired by the Footway Group. At the time of its acquisition, Sportamore had sales of more than one billion Swedish kronor (€98m-$117m). Prior to founding Sportamore, Ryding worked for seven years at Nike EMEA in positions such as as strategic account manager and account executive.
WeSports’ latest buy is Finwake, a leading water sports equipment specialist from Finland that will allow the group to enter the water sports and water leisure products market. Finwake has a strong position in Finland with its DTC website vesiurheilu.fi, as well as a portfolio of strong proprietary brands such as Saimaa SUP and Saima Active.
In the previous months, WeSports took over companies involved in the fitness, cycling, outdoor, racquet sports, team sports and nutrition segments. After the acquisitions of Rawbike and the Nordic Outdoor & Sports Group (Outdoorexperten, Skistart.com, Climbing247 and MultiTriathlon) in April, the Stockholm-based enterprise announced a few other takeovers on its website in August. Among the companies that have been newly integrated into the group are the bike rental company Benefit Bikes and a bicycle accessories specialist, Tooorch, as well as a Finnish-based fitness equipment company, Gymstick; a food supplements company, Proteinbolaget; and a racquet sports specialist, Tengo.
WeSports has also entered the market for floorball products with the acquisition of Klubbhuset, described as one of the world’s largest online floorball stores. It runs the klubbhuset.com web store and operates five physical stores in Sweden.
Meanwhile, the North European Trust AB (Netab), a company previously acquired by the WeSports group, has further invested in the growing micro-mobility market with the acquisition of dinhoj.se, an online retailer of spare parts for mopeds and scooters. Netab is described as a Nordic market leader in mopeds, electric mopeds and electric light mobility vehicles, with proprietary brands such as Viarelli, Elo, Ten7 and X-Pro.
The emphasis of the group’s business still is on the outdoor and cycling sectors. The online retailers Cykelkraft, Biketown and Cykloteket are part of the group as well as two brands of bicycles, Kronan and Made. Most of the brands were bought by WeSports during the last two years. WeSports did not provide any information on the financial terms of the acquisitions or the overall volume of its investments or its sources of financing.
Apparently, WeSports is expanding its brand and store portfolio aggressively to a very broad selection of sports and mobility products. In announcing some of the latest acquisitions on its own website last month, Wesports said that its “..journey has merely started…” It defined itself as “sports equipment category experts in bikes, hockey, fitness, mobility, climbing, trekking, outdoor, skiing and extreme endurance sports. For now.”
For the time being, the group, founded in 2019, owns about 30 sports brands and 23 online stores involved in seven sports, according to the latest version of its website. It counts a total of 177 employees. Chaired by one of its founders, Mikael Olander, and run by Jonas Lönnquist, who took their functions less than one year ago, WeSports intends to build “the leading online special sports & leisure equipment group in the Nordics,” according to its Linkedin profile.
