Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the charismatic and unconventional French-Swiss billionaire who acquired and turned around Adidas in the mid-1990s, died on July 4 of leukemia, a disease against which he had been fighting for many years. He was 63 years old, and we knew him well.
Louis-Dreyfus sold most of his shares in Adidas even before he left as chairman and chief executive of the group at the beginning of 2001, making a huge capital gain, but he kept the controlling interest that he acquired in 1996 in the loss-making Olympique de Marseille (OM) football club through his holding company, Eric Soccer.
His wife and his three children, who will inherit his huge fortune, have issued a statement stating that they will not let the club down. A passionate football fan, RLD pumped €210 million into the club. As its chairman, he also had to endure in 2006 the humiliation of a court sentence for abuse of company funds.
His other major holdings are kept in a family trust, set up after he acquired 51 percent of the shares in a large family-owned conglomerate, Louis-Dreyfus SAS, involved in the trading of cereals and many other businesses. After leaving Adidas, he developed it successfully in the area of telecommunication and others, building it up into a group with annual sales of more than €25 billion. Together with other partners, he acquired Le Coq Sportif and played an instrumental role in a plan to create a Chinese retail giant through a merger of four significant market players, but that deal fell through in December 2008.
Educated at Harvard University and in the S. Warburg investment bank, RLD was described as a “Don Juan of business,” after the title of a very good biography. Without the financial help of his family and with the proceeds of his victories in poker games, he made an investment in 1981 in IMS, a large American pharmaceutical analysis company, which he subsequently resold to Dun & Bradstreet at a large profit. Between 1989 and 1993 he turned around Saatchi & Saatchi, the British advertising company. With temporary help from Charles Saatchi and together with his partner Christian Tourres, he took over Adidas in 1993 from Bernard Tapie at a low price through the French state-owned Crédit Lyonnais.
Under the management of RLD, Adidas changed its company culture and completed the mutation from a manufacturer of all kinds of products for all kinds of sports to a more focused market-oriented competitor of Nike with a truly international business approach. After only three years of re-engineering, in 1996, Adidas generated a net profit of $166.6 million. A year later, Adidas took over Salomon, including its TaylorMade golf subsidiary. After RLD’s departure, his successor, Herbert Hainer, sold Salomon to Amer Sports but kept TaylorMade and took over Reebok.
