Dunlop expects to introduce its first pickleball products in the second half of 2024, according to its CEO for Iberia, Richard Jackson, who has spoken with CMDsport. Although he declined to go into detail, Jackson did say that Dunlop’s “flagship product in tennis, pádel and squash is the ball, and it will be no different with pickleball.”
He also remarked on the Spanish market for racquet sports. Dunlop Spain fell short in full-year 2023 of its revenue total for the previous year, when, he recalls, “we were coming out of 2021 with a boom in pádel.” It proved unsustainable into 2023, a “year of adjustment” for the sport in Spain, when ambitious orders met a “saturated market” and turned into overstock.
FY22 was in fact the year pádel outsold tennis at Dunlop. The sports have more or less equalized since, especially as tennis enjoyed “good demand” throughout 2023, thanks to the company’s “agreements with territorial federations and big events like the Madrid Open and the Godó [Barcelona Open].” Dunlop has also renewed its sponsorships with both the ATP and the Australian Open for another five years and retains official-ball sponsorships with the tennis federations of Madrid and Andalusia and with the Davis Cup, in Málaga.
Pádel, Jackson expects, will improve over the course of 2024 despite a certain reserve among stores in the first half. Rather than trouble retailers with a new collection, he says, Dunlop is extending the life of its pádel collection from 2023 and has gotten to work on the one for 2025.
The sport, in his estimation, has is going through a period of adjustment in Scandinavia but is developing well in Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as the Middle East, Central America, the US and Australia.
