What will be the fate of Puma ? The scenario of a sale of the sports brand, a subsidiary of Kering since 2007, is being revived. The luxury group announced on Tuesday 24 October, a quarterly revenue flirting with $ 4 billion of euros. The group owned by the family Pinault takes advantage of the “excellence performance activities luxury” ; its brands Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent strongly contributed to the leap of 28.4 % of its activity in the third quarter. With them, comes the sea serpent of a sale of Puma, a wholly atypical in a group weighing 12.4 billion euros in turnover.
So far, François-Henri Pinault has always swept of a reverse of the hand all the rumours of a sale, while admitting how much the brand is an “active” non-strategic “. “We will have the opportunity to consider some of the options, but later, and probably not on the short-term,” admitted Jean-Marc Duplaix, chief financial officer of Kering, in a conference call on Tuesday, October 24.
But, in the eyes of the analysts, more than ever, the conditions of a sale appear to be met. Kering has managed to revive the German brand of sport, a challenger of the american Nike and his fellow Adidas. After a monumental success in the 1990s thanks to her shoes of a racing car driver and his spikes of athletics, the brand has been victim of a very large air hole, shortly after the takeover of 86 % of its capital in 2007 by François-Henri Pinault. Since then, the brand fell flat in its profitability. It is ultimately under the leadership of a former football player that baraka is back.
After the football clubs, the people
The Norwegian Björn Gulden, chief executive officer since July 2013, has restated the accounts by repositioning the favorite brand of the sprinter jamaican Usain Bolt on the sport market. In 2014, it is rounded up to the Nike sponsorship contract with the English football club Arsenal for an amount of 36 million…
