The Intersport cooperative in Germany is launching a multitude of new projects this year on the digital front and others, after booking an increase in the turnover of its retail members in the country of just one percent to €2.90 billion in 2016, due in particular to a weak Christmas selling season. Comparatively, the German market grew by 0.8 percent to €7.71 billion last year, according to the German sporting goods retailers' federation, VDS (the market is bigger based on our definition).
Sales of winter sports products fell by 5 percent at Intersport stores in Germany. Declines of 6 percent were recorded in the equally-seasonal water and racquet sports. On the other hand, sales of leisurewear rose by 7 percent for the spring/summer season and by 3 percent for the autumn/winter season. Outdoor grew by 4 percent, fitness by 3 percent and running/walking by 2 percent.
Football and other team sports enjoyed a 5 percent sales increase. Intersport sold 330,000 German football team jerseys during the recent European championships, a little fewer than during the 2014 World Cup.
With 1,482 stores at the end of the year, the same number as a year earlier, the 939 affiliated retail members added about 20,000 square meters of space to their physical stores in Germany and developed their presence online. Their digitalization process is going to get a big boost in the next 36 months, as part of wider efforts being deployed by Intersport at the international level, steered by a new European hub being established in the Netherlands.
Two new physical stores will open in Berlin later this year to test a new retail concept for Intersport. Similar openings will take place in The Hague and Athens. On the other hand, the German cooperative will segment the market between the classical directly managed stores of its retail members and those of their franchisees.
Intersport Deutschland will also invest €40 million at its head office in Heilbronn to construct a new 10,000-square-meter logistic center that will go into operation next year. It will also set up a cooperative online platform in the third quarter for data analysis, setting up its own customer relation management (CRM) system at the members' disposal.
The cooperative will seek to collect sell-out data from its retail members that will allow them to better benchmark themselves, to optimize their ranges and their margins, and to launch more efficient and targeted campaigns
Intersport Deutschland has retail members in six countries which, together, had retail sales of €3.52 billion last year. As reported separately, the Austrian Intersport organization, which belongs to the same company as the German one, booked a 13 percent increase to €450 million domestically, due in large part to Sports Direct International's weakening position in the market. A total of 285 Intersport stores were operating in Austria at the end of the year, up from 279 a year earlier.
In the other countries where the German-based cooperative operates, sales were flat at the 35 stores in the Czech Republic and declined by 5 percent in Slovakia (13 stores), by 4 percent in Poland (37 stores) and by one percent in Hungary (13 stores). The number of stores was the same as a year earlier except for one fewer in Poland.
