“Creating the New” – that’s the name of the five-year strategy Adidas issued in 2015. Now Adidas is in “full execution mode,” says CEO Kasper Rorsted at the very beginning of the press conference. And things have gone very successfully so far: Adidas cracked 20 billion euros in revenue for the first time in the 2017 fiscal year, and rose sales volumes to 21.2 billion euros (an increase of 15 percent).
Profits also rose in the 2017 fiscal year, to 1.43 billion euros. But more important to CEO Rorsted at the 2018 balance press conference are the long-term goals. This includes “high-grade revenue growth with overproportionate increases in profits”: Adidas aims to tweak its profit margin to 11.5 percent in 2020. In 2017 the company was at 9.8 percent, with between 10.3 and 10.5 percent expected for 2018.
And these are the most important strategic points for reaching this goal:
“We’ve become a digital company,” says Kasper Rorsted. Part of this, for example, is the fact that (according to Rorsted) 90 percent of the marketing budget will already be given over to digital campaigns and social media. “We can thus interact with consumer and be where they are.” At the same time, they are a very young company. For the employees, there is no “digital transformation,” as they “already are digital” and have a high affinity for digital topics.
Furthermore, according to Rorsted, Adidas is now gaining lots of insight from Big Data and digital analyses. With 3D printing and in the Speedfactory, the production processes are as digitized as much as possible.
When it comes to revenue growth, e-commerce far outstripped all distribution channels last year at a growth of 57 percent.
They now understand the USA better, the Adidas CEO said. A 27 percent growth for North America proves him right. Besides e-commerce and the business in China, North America is a strategic growth area for Adidas and one of the “main drivers for success,” says Rorsted. In the US it’s important to service the key businesses of football, baseball, and basketball, not soccer like in Europe. In addition there are, of course, several global trends coming out of the US.
Music stars Kanye West and Pharrell Williams would have been an enormous help for Adidas’ lifestyle division here. The CEO is cautious about the positive development compared to competitors Nike and Under Armour: Adidas also started from a weaker foundation, and expectations in the competition are made much higher with the positive headlines of recent years.
Adidas is concentrating on its core brands and Reebok. For example, brands like Adidas Neo and Originals are strong growth engines. Both the golf subsidiary TaylorMade and the ice hockey brand CCM were sold (at a loss). Reebok is set to be profitably positioned again within a few years.
For this purpose, a “very hip” headquarters in Boston was set up and everything was centralized there. “Cool designers like Victoria Beckham,” focusing, and a digital business model are set to be further supports for the turnaround. “The challenge isn’t the growth in itself,” said Rorsted about Reebok, “it’s in the profitability.”
Important above all for the sporting goods manufacturer is high speed in production and delivery. “We need to make sure that products don’t sell out in high demand,” said Rorsted. This includes the introduction of the Speedfactorys in Ansbach (Germany) and Georgia (USA) for fast but individually produced products.
London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Paris are the six cities that, from Adidas’ perspective, have an international signal effect and a global marketing influence. There was disproportionately high investment here – in marketing campaigns, infrastructures, and initiatives.
“We’re using open source to make sure we bring cool products to the market,” says Rorsted. This is complementary to Adidas’ own innovations. One example of this is the collaboration with the natural protection organization Parley for the Ocean. Here, more than one million shoes were produced from plastic waste last year.
