German sporting goods producer Puma has reported a strong rise in bottom-line profit for the third quarter. It attributed the good result to a number of successful sponsorships of athletes - and its Rihanna connection.
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Herzogenaurach, Germany-based sports fashion company Puma announced Thursday it almost doubled its net profit in the third quarter thanks to strong growth in sales driven by sponsorships of top Olympic athletes in Rio.
Sponsorships included one with Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who won three gold medals at the Olympics.
The sporting goods maker reported bottom-line earnings of 39.5 million euros ($43 million) for the July to September period, marking a staggering 98-percent increase over the same three months a year earlier.
Global uptick
Sales at the group surged in all of its business regions, with a double-digit increase in the Americas as well as in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Suppliers fight for the Bundesliga
For European and American sporting goods manufacturers, Germany's national Bundesliga football league is an opportunity to rake in some serious cash. Each season, they do business worth millions of dollars.
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Easy game for Adidas
It's hard not to start a conversation about the Bundesliga without mentioning FC Bayern. The club's kit is supplied by Adidas, which reportedly pays around 25 million euros ($27.9 million) a year to outfit the powerhouse team. While that may sound like a lot, it's only a quarter of what Adidas pays Manchester United for the same privilege.
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A cool 5 million
The Herzogenaurach-based apparel maker gets an even better deal with the German football club Schalke 04. Adidas pays Schalke around 5 million euros for the right to provide its players with jerseys, shorts, socks and shoes.
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The most powerful adversary...
...of FC Bayern in the Bundesliga is Borussia Dortmund. And since Adidas' main rival in Germany is Puma, it only makes sense that Borussia Dortmund gets its kit not from the brand with the three stripes, but the one with the leaping wild cat as its logo.
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The American top dog
A total of six Bundesliga clubs - that's one in three - have signed contracts with Nike this season. Among them is RB Leipzig, a club that was founded with the help of a major energy drink manufacturer. (Guess what the RB stands for?) Such strong financial backing has certainly made life easier for the team's manager, Ralf Rangnick, a former Schalke trainer.
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A wild, growing market
Not so long ago, Adidas and Puma divided the sports kit market among themselves. But now about half a dozen companies, including the smaller firm Jako, are competing for a piece of the pie. Jako supplies kits to the clubs Bayer Leverkusen and Darmstadt 98, though if some players' beards get any longer, Jako might not get the kind of brand visibility it's looking for.
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Shoes were the best-performing product line, although growing sales of clothing and accessories also fed into total revenues of 990 million euros.
Puma Chief Executive Bjorn Gulden made a point of emphasizing that Rihanna's new Fenty Puma fashion collection had played no small role in boosting the company's lifestyle products.
Two to three years ago, many of Puma's products were simply non-sellers, making the firm lose market share to rivals Nike and Adidas.
But thanks to Rihanna, consumers' appetite for Puma items had gone up considerably, the group said.
