The watchwords for this year at Deportes Halcón are recovery and stability. CMDsport has spoken with its director of finance and marketing, Sandra Benito, according to whom sales for first-quarter 2023 at the four-store chain in Madrid are more or less flat. “The market,” she says, “is not easy.” Suppliers are limiting supply and sales policy, energy costs are up, and demand is fluctuating.
Last year’s sales were, according to Benito, “similar” to those of 2021, which the national registry, according to CMDsport, records as €3.08 million – a record for the forty-year-old chain.
The chain’s owner, a company called Bedecar, also owns Tenis World Padel (TWPadel), which runs one physical store and an e-commerce site, both specialized in pádel. Operations began in February 2022 for the website and in November 2022 for the store, located at Deportes Halcón’s headquarters in Navalcarnero (on the outskirts of the Spanish capital).
The pádel business has so far been “somewhat less favorable than our initial forecasts.” Spain has become “very complex, because of the parallel sales channels and the overstock in the market, both between stores and between the suppliers themselves.” Like the chief executive at Drop Shot (Marcelo Cascabelo), Benito sees a sales war taking place, especially online. Nine-tenths of TWPadel’s sales are online.
The only expansion plan underway is the translation of the Deportes Halcón e-commerce website into English and German, whose completion date has shifted from April to May. Rather than open new ones, the company plans to consolidate its existing points of sale, multisport and pádel alike, and reevaluate things in 2024.
