Amer Sports passes 2 billion euro sales mark

By

Olivier Guyot

Published
Feb 5, 2013

Though weather conditions might not have been favourable for winter sports in 2012, Amer Sports certainly did not suffer. The Finish group which owns Salomon, Arc’Teryx, Atomic and Nikita, saw its Winter & Outdoor division increase 4% before exchange rates to 1.22 billion euros.

In terms of retail, equipment - which generates 425 million euros worth of sales - saw a decline of 8% compared to 2011. On the other side, shoes (314 million) grew 7% and biking (129 million) 5%. Sports instruments (104 million) - which includes Suunto’s GPS watches - and clothing - which include Saloman and Arc’teryx - grew an impressive 12 and 23% respectively.

Sales in the ball sport division, mainly led by tennis, progressed by 5% to 570 million euros and fitness saw growth of 10% to 237 million.
Europe remains the number one market for the group and saw growth of 10% in the past quarter. For the year, revenue grew by 4% to 963 million euros in Europe while in America, revenue rose 5% to 834 million euros. Asia Pacific grew 14% to 267 million.

"We finished a good but a highly challenging year 2012 with strong momentum in the fourth quarter. We continued to drive growth, by-passing EUR 2 billion in net sales for the first time,” said CEO Heikki Takala. “In 2012, our Winter Sports Equipment business was adversely impacted by the previous mild and late winter, and whilst the business did pick up in the fourth quarter, the full year sales were down by 8%. Encouragingly, due to our operational efficiency program Focus, Winter Sports Equipment safeguarded 5% profitability.”

In reality, the group managed to maintain stables earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) of more than 136. Operational profits, however, went from 7.2% in 2011 to 6.6% in 2012.

“Although we did not improve profitability in 2012, we mitigated the impacts of the mild winter 2011/12 and the economic headwinds, and we kept the Group operating profit at the previous year's level,” said Takala.

To further drive this improvement, Amer Sports is implementing the earlier announced restructuring program with the objective to drive target scale and synergies and complexity reduction across the Group. The group will continue to focus on “soft goods” (clothing, shoes etc) and is expecting to report an increase in sales and turnover in 2013.