Specialty sporting goods and outdoor retailers in Germany and some other countries are suffering from rising competition from pure online retailers like Zalando, a company that we generally cover only through Shoe Intelligence, our publication on the non-athletic shoe market, because of its emphasis on this sector. According to a report in The Sunday Times, Rocket Internet and other shareholders of this European version of Zappos has approached Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley to advise them on a possible flotation of the company on the stock exchange. The report indicates that Zalando could be worth more than €5 billion. It began to break even in the first half of 2013 on sales of €809 million.

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