Vincenzo Mancini, whose family owns Cisalfa Sport, died suddenly of a heart attack last Saturday, just as he was waiting for his personal fitness coach at his home in Tivoli, a town near Rome. Aged 65, he is said to have been working long hours over the past couple of years as the chief executive of Italy's largest sporting goods retailing group, aided by his brother Maurizio on the product side.
The board of Cisalfa Sport, which also controls Intersport Italia, will meet next week to decide on the new management structure and further action. The company told us that the group's operations are not expected to undergo any changes and that it will pursue its activities based on its prior long-term plans. One of those plans was for Cisalfa to go public by 2020.
Together with Cisalfa, Intersport and some of their strategic partners, the Mancini family bought an entire page on Italy's main newspapers to announce the sad news, which read “Ciao Vincenzo!” Representatives of key suppliers were among the 500-odd people who attended the manager's funeral in Tivoli last Monday.
As a visionary and dynamic entrepreneur, Mancini managed to build up gradually a network of sporting goods stores with a presence all over Italy, a country where most of the other major retailers have been concentrating on specific regions. We knew him well and appreciated him greatly.
Mancini opened his first shop selling leisure goods in Tivoli, called Sportland, in 1977, after mounting skis for a local retailer. Together with his brother Maurizio, he then established the Cisalfa Sport banner as a leader in the Rome area. They branched out to northern Italy in 1994 with the acquisition of the former Goggi Sport in Bergamo, followed by numerous other acquisitions in the Milan area and elsewhere.
In 2006, Mancini sold his majority stake in Cisalfa to an Italian investment firm, Investitori Associati, but then bought back all the shares in 2013, when it was going through a rough patch. Under his leadership, the company has made a spectacular turnaround. In the financial year ended in February 2017, it made a net profit of more than €12.5 million on revenues of nearly €427 million and started to invest heavily in e-commerce. Excluding Intersport, sales reached €351 million, and they grew further to €380 million in the subsequent financial year.
Today, Cisalfa Sport operates 144 sporting goods stores under various banners in Italy, not including about 180 stores affiliated with Intersport in the country. They employ some 2,500 people. Together, Cisalfa and Intersport Italia had a share of the Italian sporting goods market that we estimated at 20 percent for 2017, second only to Decathlon's share of 27 percent.
In addition to Ellesse and other licensed brands, the group's portfolio of brands and retail banners includes Best Company, Cammarata Sport, Germani Sport, Longoni Sport, Este Sport and Milanesio.
