Babolat now leads the tennis racket race
07/07/2016
These figures are an estimate that Dutch-Austrian brand Head gave to the FT; the newspaper said at the time that the main brands involved in the market prefer not to make their sales figures public. However, it went on to say that Japanese brand Yonex has the fourth-biggest share of the global market, followed by Head and then US brand Wilson in second place.
Top spot, according to what the FT referred to as “industry consensus” belongs to Babolat, a French brand that only began making rackets in 1994 after more than 100 years of limiting itself to the manufacture of the strings along.
In a clever move, Babolat hand-picked a group of junior players at the time and invested its relatively small budget for sponsored athletes in them. This group included Carlos Moyá, Kim Clijsters and Andy Roddick, all of whom went on to win Grand Slam titles. Most famously of all, one of the promising juniors Babolat invested in went on to become one of the biggest global stars the game of tennis has ever had: Rafael Nadal, who has stuck with Babolat throughout a professional career.
Lyon-based Babolat is also one of the most innovative racket manufacturers on the global stage and has now released high-end rackets with sensors integrated into the handle to record digitally details of each shot an athlete plays.
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