Jabra has announced its shock exit from the consumer headphones business.
On the same day that it announced the new Jabra Elite 8 Active Gen 2 and Elite 10 Gen 2 earbuds, Danish parent company GN Group has shockingly revealed that it will “gradually wind-down its Elite and Talk product lines”.
According to a company press release, the company wishes to “increase focus and resources on more attractive parts of GN’s business”, namely its Hearing, Enterprise, and Gaming businesses.
It seems that while GN and Jabra has been pleased with how it’s been able to mix it with the big boys at the top of the true wireless audio market, with improved profitability since last year, it doesn’t feel that further investment is justified in an increasingly challenging market. Put simply, while it still makes consistently great true wireless earphones, it doesn’t think there’s money to made with them.
Jabra will also be exiting the mono Bluetooth headset market, with its Talk product line set to wrap up.
This is all surprisingly news, as Jabra has always been there or thereabouts with its Elite earbuds, producing impressively complete products at competitive prices. You could argue that it nailed the true wireless audio formula well before some of the high profile competition with the likes of the Jabra Elite 75T.
More recently we were mightily impressed with the Jabra Elite 8 Active (pictured), which has proved to be one of the best sets of workout earbuds money can buy.
Jabra has continued to innovate right to the last, with the brand new Elite Gen 2 lineup boasting the world’s first LE Audio smart case, allowing you to stream high quality latency-free audio by physically hooking the case to a source.
There’s no two ways about it: Jabra will be missed.