JD Sports appears to be letting things simmer down at Sprinter. The latter’s old C-suite has remained in charge. It continues to pursue much of its old strategy, according to Sprinter’s Retail Director, César Cuadrillero, who recently granted an interview to Alicante Plaza. The current year has nonetheless seen the start of something new.
As we’ve reported, JD Sports acquired Sprinter’s old owner, Iberian Retail Sports Group (IRSG), back in July 2023. Still, Sprinter’s founders, the Sonae family, soon grew unhappy with the new management’s focus on JD and invoked a divorce clause. Long story short, JD bought out IRSG’s minority shareholders. On top of this, however, Sprinter’s operator in The Netherlands, Sports Unlimited Retail (SUR) went belly-up in that same year of 2023.
The result has been consolidated ownership and the two big changes that Cuadrillero mentions in the interview: namely, Sprinter’s exit from The Netherlands, which occurred this past Christmas, and the banner switch from Sprinter to JD for certain stores. Last we heard – back in April – 28 to 30 Sprinter and Sport Zone stores in Spain would be making the switch by sometime in 2025.
Cuadrillero provides no figures on switches made but says that no others are planned for the current year. He adds that Sprinter will seek, wherever possible, to introduce its banner next to or near JD’s. They are already both present in the same places, 60 to 70 percent of the market, he says.
Store openings for next year Cuadrillero expects to exceed the usual annual number of ten to a dozen. To wit, there will be at least 15 new stores in 2025 – many in Alicante province, one for certain in La Nucía. Sprinter is looking for spaces of at least 600 to 800 square meters. Whatever its size, Cuadrillero says, a store should offer the same experience, the same chance to test products, and full omnichannel service.
Growth in e-commerce sales, incidentally, has been “exponential year after year,” and the website serves as a means of keeping in “constant contact” with customers.
Overall revenues for 2023, Cuadrillero confirms, were up 13 percent year-on-year to €585 million. Sprinter is on track for similar growth this year, he says, but a year’s last half tends to be the more difficult.
Sprinter’s two categories, shoes and apparel, are at a near 50-50 split in sales, but shoes have the edge. As Cuadrillero explains, they are “much more un-weatherly. Whether it’s cold or raining or hot, you’re going to buy your running shoe.” Not so with textiles.
And running is Sprinter’s top segment, followed by training (clothes for the gym, yoga, Crossfit) and team sports (especially football – for which “I think this is going to be a very good year”).
Sprinter’s own brands – Mitical (cycling), Ipso (running), Boriken (outdoor sports) and Proton (racquet sports) – are “very stable,” still focused on beginners and make up a small share of overall revenue. Most of the company’s growth, according to Cuadrillero, stems from international brands, and the top three of these are invariably the top three: Nike, Adidas and Puma.
This, Cuadrillero points out, is the difference between Sprinter and its often-cited competitor, Decathlon, which, by his reckoning, derives about 90 percent of its revenues from its own brands. “If we say that JD’s customer differs Sprinter’s, so does Decathlon’s. If you want to buy a sneaker with the latest carbon sole, you have to go to Sprinter. If you want a white label with X performance, you might go to Decathlon.”
Sprinter’s main market is and will remain Iberia, he says, and to say Sprinter is to mean also Sport Zone, the company’s banner in Portugal. The company’s growth on the peninsula has been “vertiginous” since 2011 when JD first entered into the ownership. “We’ve gone from being a family operation with 40 stores to the operator with the most stores in Iberia.”
