Latest Headlines – Page 425
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Still Saddled By Equipment, Quiksilver Invests In Emerging European Markets
Quiksilver has finalized its agreement to sell Cleveland Golf to SRI Sports Limited, yielding proceeds of about $105 million which will help to reduce debt levels. However, the poor performance of the group’s equipment business, including Rossignol and its satellite ski brands, strongly diminished the group’s results for the financial ...
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Arcandor Seeks To Become A Big Player In The European Department Store Market
Arcandor is internationalizing. The big German retail group, formerly known as Karstadt-Quelle, has agreed to take a 25 percent stake in the prestigious French department store chain Printemps and in its Italian counterpart, La Rinascente. Both Karstadt and Printemps, which came under common ownership not so long ago, have important ...
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Lafuma Group Repositions Lafuma Brand
The results were considerably lower than the French outdoor company had expected for its full fiscal year ended Sept. 30. A difficult market in France and two disastrous and badly managed seasons over the past year were blamed by the management of Lafuma for a 32 percent drop in its ...
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Rossignol Celebrates Its 100th Anniversary In Novel Ways
Rossignol and the French ski resort of Val d’Isère are sponsoring a series of 100 shorts TV spots that have started to run on M6, a French music and entertainment TV channel, during prime-time viewing hours. Each short film features a different mountain personality, and Rossignol, which celebrated its 100th ...
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Npd Analyzes Winter Sports Sales
Just as the winter selling season commences on a promising note, the NPD Group has brought out figures showing that France comes second in size to the USA in a world ranking of the major winter sports markets. Just ahead of the Canadian and German markets, France generated a turnover ...
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New Efforts To Stimulate Sports Participation In Europe
The health and consumption directorate of the European Commission set up a new platform last month that various associations and interest groups can use to propose initiatives to stimulate sports participation and other activities that will provide health benefits for European consumers. Various associations in the areas of fitness, physical ...
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The Next Winter Ispo Will Break New Records
ISPO will host more than 2,000 exhibitors for the first time during its Winter edition next Jan. 27-30, compared with 1,970 last February. The total net exhibition area will grow to 185,000 square meters from 180,000 sqm., and in many halls the aisles will be narrower than before. The ...
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Icelanders Want To Merge Intersport With Sport-master In Denmark
The 45 shareholders of Sport Danmark, the company that runs the Sport-Master buying and franchising group in Denmark, are set to decide by next Tuesday whether they want to sell it along with all the affiliated retail companies to an Icelandic capital fund, Arev, and to an investment bank, Straumur. ...
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Jd Group Buys Focus
The John David Group (JD), which is at the moment the healthiest of Britain’s four largest sports retailers, has acquired a stake of 49 percent in the Focus Group, a leading licensing and distribution company with rights to a plethora of brands from Le Coq Sportif to Sergio Tacchini and ...
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Foreign And Indigenous Retailers Storm Through The Balkans
Many leading local and foreign retailers are expanding rapidly in the fast-growing sporting goods markets of the Balkan countries from Slovenia down to Bulgaria, or harboring plans for the short term, capitalizing on the fast economic expansion and on the strong development of shopping centers and other modern forms of ...
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100-year-old Luhta Sponsors Santa Claus
Luhta, the oldest and best known brand of Finland’s L-Fashion Group, has secured the rights to act as official supplier of clothing to Santa Claus, who is supposed to live in Rovaniemi, a little Finnish town along the Arctic Circle where he has his own postal office to handle more ...
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Lotto Is Re-engineering Etonic For Growth
Lotto is taking a little more time than expected to develop Etonic into a stronger and more widely distributed brand, targeting annual sales increases of 15-20 percent from next year onwards. When it bought this American brand of running, golf and bowling shoes one year ago, the Italian company was ...
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Reporting Sharply Lower Profits, Sdi Sells Original Shoe To Jjb
While reporting a big drop in profits, Sports Direct International announced this week its decision to sell the Original Shoe Company (OSC) for £5 million (€6.9m-$10.0m) in cash to JJB Sports, its leading rival in the UK sports retail business, in a deal to be finalized on Jan. 28. The ...
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Sdi Sees Tougher Times Ahead, Hits Snags Over Its Investment In Umbro
The Croatian thunderbolt that deprived England’s football team last week of its qualification for next year’s European football championships has precipitated two profit warnings and deepened worries about the prospects of the British sports retail business over the next months. Sports Direct International, the country’s largest sports retailer, was ...
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Blacks Names New Chief Executive
Neil Gillis has been placed in the hot seat at Blacks Leisure Group, the British outdoor and board sports retailer. The 42-year-old executive spent four years at the head of Esporta, a British health and fitness club company, until its sale in May. His experience of more than two decades ...
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As Adventure Gets New Funding To Grow Even Further
Mitiska and Emiel Lathouwers, who hold equal shares in AS Lathouwers, the Belgian holding company above AS Adventure, Cotswold and Bever Zwerfsport, have confirmed a deal to sell their stakes to Lion Capital, a London-based investment fund. Sealed at a price of €215 million, the sale of the fast-moving outdoor ...
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Foot Locker Sees Changes In The European Landscape
With the current market conditions in the USA, Foot Locker had trouble breaking even in its back-to-school third quarter, ended Nov. 3. Although operating margins inched up by 0.4 percent for the group’s business outside the USA, they sank by 0.3 percent on domestic sales during the quarter. Unit ...
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Amer Consolidates Winter Sports And Softgoods Management
After spending his whole career at Salomon, the company’s 50-year-old president, Jean-Luc Diard, is leaving the Amer Sports group to pursue other unspecified interests as Michael Schineis, president of Atomic, is named president of a new combined winter sports equipment business area of the group. Noting that Schineis is a ...
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Champion Europe Launches Basketball Central And Other Initiatives
Opening just next Thursday in a central high-traffic area of Milan, which is both a capital of basketball and fashion, Basketball Central is the first of a series of concept stores that Champion Europe intends to operate in various parts of the continent, if the format works out well. A ...
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Puma Wants To Play A Stronger Role As A Sports Brand In The Balkans
Puma will place more emphasis on sports in Romania after taking over the distribution in the country next Jan. 1. Investments in sports marketing are also planned in Bulgaria, where Puma is apparently set to raise its stake in a joint venture with its Greek distributor, Glou, from 75 to ...
