The Norwegian sporting goods retail market is going through major changes, besides the development of XXL. While ONS Invest, former owner of Voice, has become the controlling shareholder of Gresvig, one of the competing buying groups, Sport 1, has changed in terms of ownership, too, and another one, Sport 25, has changed its name to Stadion. Both are re-positioning themselves as a higher-end alternative to Gresvig, claiming better margins for their affiliates and a more cooperative attitude with the brands.
Executives of Sport 1 and Stadion believe that they can make a difference from Gresvig for several reasons: the latter requires high discounts to do business with the brands, it has a big private label business and it is going strongly into the fashion market with its acquisition of Voice. They both claim that Gresvig, as a public company, is looking mainly for volume and profits, reducing the margins of its suppliers and of its affiliated retailers.
Sport 1 is a buying cooperative previously owned more or less equally by its 160-odd affiliated retailers, who run 180 shops of varying sizes, generating annual sales of around €1.5 billion Norwegian kroner (€188.0m-$228.8m). A couple of months ago its largest member, Anton Sport, acquired a 67 percent shareholding in Sport 1, announcing a plan to work more closely with the brands in all areas, bundling orders together in return for higher discounts. One and a half years ago Sport 1 acquired a logistics firm with a warehouse in Moss, the home of Helly Hansen, and is now looking for a new buyer.
Anton Sport is one of the few integrated sporting goods retail chains in Norway. Run by a young entrepreneur, Morten Borgersen, it has 11 stores in Oslo and Barum with annual sales approaching 200 million NOK (€25m-$30m), and with a focus on good-quality high-margin and high-priced branded items. The sales personnel is highly trained and motivated through a variety of clinics and sales incentives, and they participate in the purchasing.
Anton Sport is particularly strong in certain categories such as skis and bicycles. Nike is their biggest brand, and they tend to sell the top of the range for such other brands as Bergans, a big national outdoor brand, Spyder Active Sports, The North Face, Peak Performance, Swix and the Lasse Kjus collection. The number of suppliers has been halved to about 100 in the last two years, concentrating on brands that agree to partner in marketing and logistics.
The Anton Sport chain is the result of a merger in 2001 among the original three Anton Sport stores, the first one of which opened in Oslo in 1932, and four others, owned by two other retailers, which subsequently adopted the same banner.
As for Stadion, which has nothing to do with the Stadium chain from Sweden, it is the new corporate name chosen last July for Sport 25, another cooperative of independent retailers set up in 1989. Stadion has 60 members with 70 doors and their combined retail turnover (including VAT) grew by about 8 percent last year to an estimated 575 million NOK (€72.1m-$87.7m). None of the affiliated retailers owns more than 10 percent of the shares, and all have the same voting rights.
The affiliated retailers are described as leaders in their respective territories. However, for marketing purposes, they are now being encouraged to adopt more widely the 9-year-old Stadion brand name as a common banner, placing it generally next to their own well-established banners.
More than 80 percent of the members’ purchases go through the buying group. Particularly strong in team sports, Stadion has an exclusive deal with Lotto for Norway, and it works with numerous other brands on a non-exclusive basis. It ensures equal mark-ups for the retailers’ pre-orders and re-orders of certain lines by stocking and dispatching the merchandise through its own warehouse south of Oslo, near the border with Sweden.
