In an interesting foray outside the turbulent U.K. market, the British sports and fashion retailer has agreed to acquire Chausport, a French retailer of athletic footwear with 78 stores in premium urban and shopping mall locations, with a strong presence in the northern part of the country. JD Sports Fashion already has some stores in Ireland.
Excluding the transaction fees, JD is paying €8.0 million for the French company and taking over its debt of €2.0 million. After a major reorganization in the past few years, which resulted in the shutdown of many unprofitable stores, Chausport posted a profit of about €600,000 last year before income tax and exceptional items on sales of €40.7 million. Chausport, which had 110 stores in operation four years ago, ended up with gross assets of €17.9 million.
A pioneer in athletic footwear retailing, Chausport was founded near Lille in 1980, but it has been overtaken in the French market by Courir, the athletic footwear chain of Go Sport, and by Foot Locker. One problem has been its inability to get access to high-margin special make-ups by some of the large brands, but this will now be possible through JD, whose buying power is much bigger.
JD, which is controlled by Pentland Group at 57 percent, may also provide its own expertise in the lifestyle and fashion segments to help develop Chausport on the French market. One of the ideas is to start a fashion retailing concept similar to that of JD’s Size chain in France. Chausport has experimented with a streetwear concept in the last couple of years by opening two stores that blend young fashion shoes and apparel, called U:mix, but it has not worked out well and this project may be dropped.
Carrying mainly the lifestyle offerings of the major sports brands, the Chausport format has been targeting families, but more recently the chain has been trying to attract younger people, too. It has done this by launching a more modern new logo and a more contemporary shopfit that has been successfully tested at two relatively large locations of between 150 and 200 square meters, in the vicinity of two Auchan hypermarkets at Louvroil and Noyelles Godault. The new concept will be rolled out throughout the existing store network before any further major expansion.
JD said it expects the acquisition of Chausport to be accretive in future years, after further investments in the existing stores and in new ones. It will retain Chausport’s chief executive, Jérôme Lepoutre, and his management team. Lepoutre and Guy-Noël Leclercq, who founded the company, were among its shareholders along with a couple of venture capital firms.
As previously reported, JD is still believed to be interested in acquiring JJB Sports, the big struggling chain of sporting goods stores in which it already holds a 9.9 percent stake, although some observers feel that British anti-trust authorities may challenge such a takeover. JD previously acquired two other British sporting goods chains, First Sport and Allsports.
