Asics Acquires Race Roster

Our industry consolidation continues. Asics has acquired Race Roster.

This is good news for Race Roster’s investors. As we have been vocal about the limited valuations of race registration providers, they likely were paid a good profit.

This is also good news for Race Roster employees as Asics does have a commitment to this market as shown by their investment in Runkeeper and the creation of Asics Digital.

The move brings focus to the potential value of sponsors to races. We have seen great adoption of the RunSignup Sponsor platform, as well as adoption of our National Sponsors of Strava and ROADiD.

As with all acquisitions, it will be interesting to see the changes that take place over time. The trade offs of corporate overhead with corporate sponsorship. The overhead of new accounting systems, new development processes, new compliance processes, new budget cycles, etc. that come with being part of a larger company. On the positive side, there is the potential for Race Roster to be able to do things like accelerate a move internationally. For races, there may be some additional sponsor money that Asics throws into their value proposition in return for access to runner data, and they may extend RunKeeper to do the GPS tracking RaceJoy does.

This puts pressure on other investor backed registration companies to find homes. With the growing pressure of sales tax implementation for marketplaces creating growing tax liabilities along with growing pressure to match the level of functionality provided by RunSignup at the same price level, the pressure will be high and the outcomes will likely not be as pleasant as the Race Roster outcome.

RunSignup continues to be the stable technology platform because of our unique employee owned structure. This acquisition and future consolidation will continue to benefit RunSignup and our customers.

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