Fischer is predicting a drop of 50 percent in sales of cross-country skis to the trade during the current season, after an estimated 37 percent drop to around 1.2 million pairs during the Winter 2006/07 season.
This includes only the top portion of the big Russian market, estimated at more than 700,000 pairs, which instead continues to grow by more than 25 percent.
Still, Fischer estimates that retailers' sales of its own cross-country skis fell by only 15 percent in the 2006/07 season and that its share of the world market is increasing from 40 to 55-60 percent. Its sales of cross-county boots in the retail shops probably fell by 18 percent as the difficult market situation prevented Fischer to convince many retailers to switch to Rottefella's NNN Nordic ski binding system. Rottefella says it delivered more than one million pairs of bindings under this system, indicating that it has become the dominant factor in the market.
Fischer also estimates that the alpine ski market declined to around 4 million pairs in the Winter 2006/07 season from 4.6 million the year before, and that it will go further down to 3.4 million during the current season, indicating a drop of more than 25 percent. Fischer is budgeting a drop of 20 percent in its own deliveries for the season and says the upper segment of its price range is holding up.
With its financial year ending on Feb. 29, Fischer is expecting a decline in its total shipments of skis to 1.1 million pairs from 1,740,000 pairs in the past year, declining to break down these figures. Part of the decline was due to the loss of an OEM contract with Salomon. Fischer produced last year only some alpine skis for Nordica and Scott and a few cross-country skis for Rossignol.
Excluding Löffler and FACC, which were spinned off last Oct. 1 into separate entitites owned by the same holding company, Fischer Sports should suffer a 25 percent decline in revenues to about €120 million through Feb. 29 on a comparable basis. Löffler generated sales of about €30 million and FACC, which is about to be sold, saw its turnover soar to €223 million.
Recent figures show that Fischer gained market shares in the important Austrian market for alpine skis last year. During the April-December period, retailers' sales of alpine skis declined by 1 percent in units and remained flat in value, according to GfK figures that we have obtained. While Atomic's share in volume declined to 23.5 percent from 29.4 percent in the same period of 2006, Fischer's advanced to 23.2 percent from 21.5 percent, and that of Head moved up from 10.0 to 13.5 percent. Atomic says its market share went down because it was left with no stocks of old skis, but a similar pattern occured in terms of value.
Austrian retailers' sales of cross-country skis went down by 13 percent in volume and by 14 percent in value during the same period. Fischer's sales of these products fell at a slower pace. The only big winner was Salomon, which was apparently liquidating old inventories.
