JD Sports will be switching 28 to 30 Sprinter and Sport Zone stores in Spain to the JD banner between now and 2025, according to Diffusion Sport.
Included in this two-year development plan is the renovation of two stores in Alicante province, in the cities of Finestrat and Alicante, both of which will be making the switch. Another 14 will follow over the course of the current year. Sprinter itself, meanwhile, will nevertheless be opening seven stores under its own banner in 2024. Its presence in Alicante province stands at 16 stores.
Finestrat’s Sprinter store was renovated not long ago, so why the switch? Because the minority shareholders in Iberian Sports Retail Group (ISRG), owner of Sprinter and Sports Zone alike, invoked a “divorce” clause.
End of the joint venture
JD Sports Fashion acquired ISRG in July 2023. A few months before, in February, JD CEO Regis Schulz laid out a plan to grow revenues and margins by double digits over five years. There would be capital expenditures on the order of €560-673 million a year, with 50 to 60 percent of them going towards store expansion in underpenetrated markets – “notably,” Schultz said in a statement, “in North America and Europe.”
By then, Schultz had been in charge for about five months, the previous CEO, Peter Cogwill, having been ousted in May 2022.
As Alicante Plaza explained last May, ISRG’s minority shareholders, Sonae Holdings and Balaiko Firaja Invest, had become disenchanted with Schultz – an executive who came to London by way of Dubai – for his focus on extra-Iberian Europe and Asia. Worse, from their perspective, he was championing the JD banner at the expense of ISRG’s banners. Moreover, Schultz has a second focus on digitalization. Sprinter’s e-commerce has been growing by double-digits over the past few years, but most of its revenues still come through physical retail.
There is in addition the earlier bankruptcy, in 2023, of Sprinter’s operator in the Netherlands, Sports Unlimited Retail (SUR). Itself a JD subsidiary, SUR controlled Perry Sport and Aktiesport as well. This has reverberated in Alicante province, triggering what Spanish law calls an expediente de regulación de empleo (ERE), in which an ailing company seeks authorization to conduct layoffs – in this case, 35 of them.
The divorce clause, according to Alicante Plaza, obliged JD either to buy out the minority shareholders or sell them its own stake. JD chose the buy-out in last November, as Murcia Plaza relates. And so the founding Segarra family no longer has a stake in Sprinter, and the banner’s new director is Francesc Casabella.
Back in October of 2023, according to JD Sports Fashion’s notice for that month’s general meeting, ISRG was operating “more than 460 stores across Europe, including JD in Iberia, Sprinter in Spain, Sport Zone in Portugal and Aktiesport and Perry Sport in the Netherlands.” ISRG also had a 98 percent holding in Deporvillage’s e-commerce and a 50.1 percent holding in Bodytone’s business in fitness equipment.
