Adidas predicts £100m sales from Olympics
German sportswear firm adidas, the official sportswear partner of the 2012 Olympic Games, said it is expecting to sell £100m worth of Games merchandise.
This amounts to 10% of the London Organising Committee’s (Locog) expected sales for 2012 merchandise and surpasses sales of Adidas’s 2008 Beijing Olympic merchandise.
Adidas has not revealed its sales figures from the Beijing Games, saying only that its merchandise sales would be higher in 2012 given the “different scope” of its marketing and merchandising rights.
Herbert Hainer, chief executive, said: “For the first time we not only have exclusive rights for the official launch products but we also have the rights for the non-branded products, which obviously gives us the opportunity to be more commercial and to sell the products through other distribution channels.”
Branded products featuring both the 2012 and Adidas logos will be sold through traditional channels such as sports retailers and department stores, but event-branded products without the Adidas logo will be sold through additional channels such as airport and tourist shops, as well as supermarkets.
Mr Hainer said he hopes to use 2012 as a springboard to overtake Nike as the sportswear market leader in the UK – one of Adidas’s four largest markets in Europe.
Adidas has about 15% of the UK sportswear market, trailing Nike by about 2-3%, said Adidas’s UK managing director, Gil Steyaert.
In addition to outfitting the volunteers, technical staff and officials for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Adidas is supplying the uniforms for Team GB and has appointed Stella McCartney as creative director, hoping to add to the “desirability” of the brand in the UK.
“When we talk about the Olympics and engagement, we’re not talking about the 17 days of the Games. We take it as a four-year period,” said Mr Hainer.
Locog has said it expects total London 2012 merchandise sales to be about £1 billion and is hoping to raise £80 million from merchandise and licensing to fund the staging of the Games.
Mr Steyaert said: “We’ve probably never had a plan of this magnitude and of this innovative level.”
